According to the National Wildlife Federation, America’s annual production of 19 billion printed catalogs consumes 53 million trees and enough energy for 1.2 million homes a year. By not printing catalogs, we conserve trees, water and inks. We also save energy usually spent on production, delivery and pollution clean-up.
Clear-cutting of natural forests still exists. No matter how well tended, tree plantations that replace natural forests often are not sufficiently diverse for all the original wildlife. Sometimes these plantations rely on herbicides that are bad for animals. We prefer to use pixels instead of paper to sell our plants.
Go ahead. Give yourself a pat on the back for not wasting resources.
Our website is our catalog. It can be refreshed daily instead of seasonally. You can access the useful ideas in our regularly updated
blog as well as information about new plants and changes in supply.
Our online catalog is designed to make communication simple and fast whether you want to contact us or send a friend information. For example, each plant description page contains tabs to click on if you want to send us a question or share with a friend. If you
write to us late at night, our answer may not be instantaneous. But one of us FBTS human beings will respond promptly the next day.
You don’t have to check the mail slot daily for a digital catalog. It arrives in a cyber flash.
Instead of mailing numerous print catalogs to individual customers, a single website catalog accommodates an unimaginably large crowd of readers without anyone peeking over your shoulder.
To print a catalog, you have to cut trees and consume many resources, including a lake of water and lots of soybeans that are converted to environmentally friendly ink.
Pulping wood for the 19 billion catalogs across America annually creates 5.2 million tons of auto emissions. TheNational Wildlife Foundation says you can fill 81,000 Olympic-size swimming pools with the 53 billion gallons of wastewater discharged during printing.
We love to read books and magazines in print, but we refuse to waste resources on something as changeable as a catalog. It gives us a big, bad headache to think about creating such big, bad carbon and water footprints.
The minute you print a catalog, something in it is already out of date. Then you have to wait another six months to a year to print another catalog. No, duh! Go digital!
Some gardeners love the agony of w-a-i-t-i-n-g for colorful garden catalogs to appear in mailboxes. But why delay when you can zip online to see what is new, beautiful and priced to please at FBTS?
If you tell a friend about a plant you just saw in a print catalog and promise to show it to them ASAP, you are likely to find the catalog three months later hopping with dust bunnies beneath your bed.
Oh, sure, there are ways to share a print garden catalog with other folks. You can try the old leave-it-in-the dentist’s office trick or put it in the staff lounge. But isn’t that a bit like sneaking door-to-door in the dark to drop off oversized zucchinis?