Every time you get a bill in the mail (well, nearly every time) or when you get yet another credit card offer, there is a reply envelope inside. It may be a BRE - Business Reply Envelope - where the company providing it pays the postage, or a CRE - Courtesy Reply Envelope on which you get to put a stamp.

Either way it takes two envelopes to complete the transaction - one coming, one going. And more than 80 billion reply envelopes are sent through the mail each year. That’s a lot of paper! The USPS has now approved a line of re-usable (”round-trip?”) envelopes manufactured by ecoEnvelopes, a company out of Stillwater, Minnesota. (Read the article)

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In the ’80s I did a stint with the US Postal Service and got to see exactly how mail is processed from beginning to end. Like laws and sausages, you don’t want to really know how things work inside the USPS. According to Wikipedia, Otto von Bismark (1815-1898) said something to the effect of, “To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.” Somewhat the same philosophy applies to mail delivery.

Actually, I consider it a modern miracle that so much is delivered with little to no fanfare, and so few pieces actually go astray. You try keeping track of tens of millions of pieces of mail in transit at a time!

(Read the article)

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Documents have been my focus for nearly two decades - their creation, distribution, and use. These paper sculptures are not “documents” in the traditional sense and have no printed text on them; however they are certainly a form of communication!

Peter Callesen, paper sculptor, takes a sheet of paper and turns it into a 3-dimensional sculpture that reflects its previous 2-dimensionality. (Read the article)

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Return labels for recyclables?

As early as 1993, Paul Hawken, in The Ecology of Commerce, described a process where at “end of life” products could be returned to their manufacturers, dismantled, and the parts reused for new products.

While we’re still several steps from actually using old cell phone parts in new cell phones - or other electronic products - at least the manufacturer has a way to take the old item back. (Read the article)

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How does your company decide what to do - build, manufacture - next? Seth Godin, author of nine books about marketing, has a very long list of reasons (excuses?) that people give to justify their decisions as to what to make and what to shelve.

Here are just a few of his. Have you used any of them?

• It’ll be fun
• It’s Bob’s turn
• It will make us look smart
• I love it
• It responds to an RFP
• It adds a feature that our CEO really, really wants
• I can sell it to customer X
• The critics will respect us
• We’ve come this far and quitting now costs too much
• We have unused capacity in the plant

Read the rest of the list here: Seth Godin’s blog, Internal Primaries.

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Remember a movie long, long ago and far, far away? Star Wars - the first… The little hologram of Princess Leia looked like something so far in the future! Was that movie really 30 years ago?

Large-scale, rewritable holograms are no longer the future, they are now. The next generation of holograms - the kind you can walk around and all but touch - are in development now.

MIT Technology Review reports that Nasser Peyghambarian, an optical engineer at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and his partner, Savas Tay, have modified a plastic used in optical communications systems that can have the way it bends, or refracts, light changed using laser beams. (Read the article)

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