ENVIRONMENTAL CLAIMS JOURNAL 2018, VOL. 30, NO. 2, 142–150 https://doi.org/10.1080/10406026.2018.1442077
The Emerging Urgency of Mitigating Environmental Impacts and Potential Public Health Risks of the United States Postal Service
Robert A. Michaels
RAM TRAC Corporation
ABSTRACT The privatized, ‘quasi-public’ United States Postal Service (USPS) is the largest commercial entity sending and delivering letters and packages. USPS vehicles drive a billion miles/year, visit 150 million addresses/day, and stimulate fossil fuel mining and vehicle pollutant emissions, with significant environmental impacts and potential public health risks. Sending and delivering therefore constitute excellent candidate activities for optimization to reduce USPS and overall impacts and risks, which depend upon spatial relationships of local post offices and mail recipients. Recipients may receive mail passively, or pick it up at their post office. Under the USPS business model, recipients lack economic incentive for the latter, even if their post office is situated along their daily travel route. USPS can incentivize such customers by dividing the price of postage between two parties: senders, covering delivery of individual pieces to recipients’local post office; and recipients, in the form of annual subscriptions covering delivery of mail to their local address. This alternative model would greatly reduce the price of postage for senders, increase the number of recipients picking up mail at a local post office box to avoid paying for delivery subscriptions, reduce USPS and overall impacts and risks, and possibly restore USPS business volume and profitability. Introduction U.S. commerce comprises a diverse collection of activities, prominently including sending and delivering packages containing merchandise and letters containing communications. The U.S. economy is huge, and its in-state and inter-state commercial sectors and their sending and delivering components comprise a significant fraction of ‘huge.’ Sending and delivering therefore exert significant environmental impacts (SLS 2008) and potential public health risks, and together they constitute excellent candidate activities for optimization to reduce them. The impacts and economics of delivery—because they require physical transport, vehicles, and fuel CONTACT Robert A. Michaels ram@ramtrac.com RAM TRAC Corporation, 3100 Rosendale Road; Schenectady, NY 12309-1510. www.ramtrac.com Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/becj. © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
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consumption—depend critically upon the spatial relationships of senders and recipients. Some merchandising giants, such as Amazon, have adapted futuristically, applying new technologies such as drones. Most, if not all, however, still rely, or partially rely, upon traditional vehicles reporting to shipping and receiving docks. The privatized, ‘quasi-public’ United States Postal Service (USPS) is the largest commercial entity in the U. S. sending and delivering letters and packages. It shares with other merchandise giants the challenges of optimizing the sending and delivery of packages, but a significant fraction of USPS operations are different, involving information in letters rather than merchandise in packages. In the information/letter
sector, USPS has suffered, and has responded non-adaptively, for example by raising prices on sending letters even though that service has lost intrinsic value due to competition from digital technologies. In the face of this challenge, USPS has continued to deploy personnel, vehicles, and fuel to deliver physical letters, producing environmental impacts and potential public health risks without justifying them by the value of its increasingly expensive service. The sending and delivering components of USPS operations therefore constitute excellent candidate activities for optimization. Such optimization might reduce a significant fraction of the impacts on the environment and associated risks to public health, as well as the economic costs of delivery. This is a matter of public interest and concern, given the impacts of USPS operations, and given the status of USPS, even though “privatized”, as a quasi-public entity. Optimization, most essentially, is the issue that is explored in this analysis.
Methods
This assessment is based upon critical examination of available literature relating to USPS operations and impacts. The analysis is mostly qualitative rather than quantitative. Methods applied are generally those of scientific peer review and synthesis of published findings to draw new conclusions.
Findings USPS business model is flawed. The enormous scale of USPS facilities, equipment, employment, and operations places a deep environmental imprint on the United States and the Earth. USPS has endeavored to reduce its environmental impacts and potential public health risks, but has overlooked a major factor that could be exploited toward achieving this goal. Specifically, mail delivery to homes and
businesses is free under the current USPS business model. Sending and delivering therefore constitute excellent candidate activities for optimization to reduce USPS and overall impacts and risks, which most essentially depend upon the spatial relationships of local post offices and mail recipients. Recipients may receive mail passively, or pick it up at their local post office. However, under the USPS business model, recipients lack economic incentive for the latter, even if their post office is situated along their daily travel route.
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Figure 1. Historical record of United States Postal Service First-Class Mail volume, by year (1926–2016)∗.
Incentivize USPS customers economically. USPS can incentivize such customers by dividing the price of postage between the sending and receiving parties, much as health insurance companies divide charges between an insurance company and an insured party, in the form of a “co-pay”. The co-pay is designed to provide economic incentive for the insured party to eliminate unnecessary medi-
cal services—a form of optimization similar to that being proposed here. The USPS charge to senders would cover delivery of individual pieces of mail to recipients’ local post office. The charge to recipients then would (optionally) cover the rest of the trip, delivery to a local address. However, it would differ from the sender charge in being an annual subscription rather than a per-piece postage fee. This alternative model of USPS operations would greatly reduce the price of postage for senders, increase the number of recipients picking up mail at a local post office box to avoid paying for delivery subscriptions, reduce USPS and overall impacts and risks, and possibly restore USPS business volume and profitability. USPS operations are huge. Data on USPS operations are provided as of 2012 (USPS 2018). In 2012, USPS letter carriers and truck drivers reached every address in the nation, that is, 151 million residences, businesses, and post office boxes. Together, USPS letter carriers and truck drivers drove 1.2 billion miles/year, and 4 million [sic] miles/day. At some variance from Fig. 1, USPS also was reported to
have processed and delivered 554 million pieces of mail, including 242.6 million pieces of First-Class Mail, that is, about 44 percent of the total number of pieces. Spatial relationships of mail senders and recipients vary. As with packages, the efficiency of letter delivery depends critically upon the spatial relationship of senders and recipients. Senders and recipients are linked by a local post office, at which letters sent to a particular area are collected, and from which they are then distributed to recipients. If a large group of recipients is situated in a single location, such as
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Figure 2. United States Postal Service surpluses and deficits, by year, FY 2001 to FY 2015∗.
an apartment building, delivery by a postal vehicle may be very efficient. In contrast, if recipients are widely dispersed, postal delivery is intrinsically less efficient, typically requiring vehicle travel to multiple destinations for multiple pieces of mail. The longest rural delivery route was reported to be Route 2 in St. Paul, Kansas (USPS
2018). There the USPS carrier travels 187 miles daily, and delivers to 173 mailboxes. The longest main street in America is 33 miles long, located in Island Park, Idaho, in zip code 83429. Impacts of vehicle use over such long distances are necessarily high, but they are higher than ‘high’ when vehicle engine idling time is counted, additional to driving distance. First-Class Mail deliveries and USPS profits have fallen. Fig. 1 shows that, in recent years, First-Class mail deliveries have fallen consistently and significantly. Loss of business to the internet and to competitors also has hurt USPS economically, as shown in Fig. 2 (Murse 2017, USPS 2016, USPS 2017). In the three most recent fiscal years (1 April to 30 September), USPS has posted deficits of $5.1 billion in FY ’15, $5.6 in FY ’16 (USPS 2016), and $2.7 billion in FY’ 17 (USPS 2017). Remedial suggestions over the years of loss clearly have been ineffective. The proposals to reduce delivery days and/or close some post offices, for example, would make delivery more expensive, and USPS less competitive, exacerbating the flawed USPS
business model. Altering the business model as described, however, would produce environmental and public health benefits, and would appear to be (happily) confluent with likely economic benefits. USPS can work to restore business volume and profitability by subdividing revenue streams. The USPS business model has included charging for services not delivered, and delivering services not charged. Reducing the price to mail senders reasonably can be expected to increase use of USPS for mailing. It also might restore
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USPS profitability, if revenue lost from reduced-price postage can be recovered, or more than recovered, from customer subscriptions covering mail delivery from local post offices to local addresses. USPS customers now are charged for post office boxes, essentially for opting out of mail delivery to their home or business address. In contrast, home and business addresses receive mail delivery each day, at no charge, but at significant cost to the USPS for labor, equipment, and energy, and to the United States (and planet) for the huge ‘carbon footprint’ associated with fossil fuel used by postal vehicles. This imbalance can be reversed by adding charges to the delivery component, subtracting
charges from the storage component (post office boxes), and reducing the price of postage.
Discussion
Environmental impacts and potential public health risks arising from excessive use of vehicles relying upon fossil fuels, and from the mining of fossil fuels to meet this high demand, together constitute emerging problems for our nation and our planet. This “inconvenient truth” is especially relevant in the context of accelerating climate change, which increasingly is attributed to greenhouse gas emissions, of which a high fraction is linked to transportation. The data reported in Findings suggest the benefit of putting in place economic incentives to motivate mail recipients to facilitate conservation by USPS, in the form of increasing the customer share of resources devoted to mail receipt, and reducing the USPS share. Optimization of
this division of resources may be driven by economic incentives, without which environmental impacts and public health risks attributable to USPS might continue to be excessive relative to the economically approached optimum scenario described herein. Passively receiving mail is free and easy for recipients, because externalizing impacts spreads the effects throughout society, most essentially degrading our common local, national, and global environment. In short, externalized impacts are borne by ‘the commons’. Garrett Hardin (1968) famously termed society’s failure to invest community members in protection of the community’s common property “the tragedy of the commons.” ‘The commons’ is a historical reference to commonly owned grazing areas present in early English villages, on which villagers could graze their cattle or their sheep. In the absence of financial charges or taxes for grazing, villagers could overgraze their herds, thereby consuming and degrading the commons without accountability, effectively externalizing the costs, which ultimately would be borne by society.
Such behavior, in the United States sometimes is termed “frontier behavior.” It inevitably will run afoul of insurmountable limiting factors imposed by Malthusian growth of population, industry, and resource demand. Growth gradually diminishes the commons, and diminishes their capacity to absorb insult. Such unaffordable degradation constitutes another basis for “emerging concern” about USPS impacts. In a review titled Beyond the roots of human inaction: fostering collective effort toward ecosystem conservation, Amel, et al. (2017) stated that “The term
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‘environmental problem’ exposes a fundamental misconception: Disruptions of Earth’s ecosystems are at their root a human behavior problem.” Clearly, finding ways to reverse degradation of the commons and cost externalization to society is a matter of emerging priority. For USPS, the time has arrived for this priority to materialize as reality. To achieve this, USPS revenue may be divided into two streams, one from mail senders and one from mail recipients. Currently, senders pay for delivery all the way to addressees. Instead, senders could pay for delivery only to an addressee’s local post office. USPS then would sell subscriptions for delivery to any of the 150 mil-
lion addresses that USPS visits each day, thereby reducing the burden on senders, increasing customer use of sending via USPS, and, for the first time, linking recipients to the real costs of delivery, including labor, vehicles, fuel, and pollution. One might ask where the idea of charging for sending but not for delivery originated, and whether precedent exists for charging instead for delivery. The answer to both questions can be discerned from Snyder (2011), which reveals that mail in 19th-century Britain was delivered under the system that we now term “postage due,” in which the sender pays nothing and the recipient pays all:
“[Around 1812 Charles] Babbage recommended that Britain introduce the ‘penny post’, in which a letter’s postage was paid in advance by the sender, and a fixed amount was charged for any distance within Britain. Under the current system at the time, postage was paid by the recipient based on how far the letter had traveled. Babbage calculated that the cost of sorting the mail and determining the appropriate postage cost more than what the postal service earned by the extra postage. Eight years after Babbage’s book was published, Britain took up his suggestion and instituted the penny post” (Snyder 2011, page 122; emphasis added). Under the current proposal, all parties would be financially invested. A similar but more extreme proposal was made to stop mail delivery to local addresses in Canadian cities, which would require postal customers to pick up their mail at their local post office (Austen 2013). The U.S. postal system, founded in 1753 by Benjamin Franklin, is linked historically to Canada’s postal system, as Canada and the 13 U.S. colonies were under British rule. If sending and delivery (hypothetically) are equally costly, the price of sending could be divided almost in half, thereby increasing USPS business. The reduced sending price also would increase access of postal services by the poor. Those in need could receive subsidies toward paying for delivery subscriptions. Now, USPS customers optionally could have post office boxes to pick up mail instead of paying for delivery. USPS is “too big to fail.” If the USPS does fail, taxpayers might be on the hook to bail out this enormous institution.
Figures reported in Findings illustrate that the impacts (and presumably the economics) of delivery depend upon sender and recipient spatial relationships. Although most mail recipients presumably would opt for delivery as before, inevitably, some could travel to a post office more economically than a post office vehicle could travel to the recipient. This would be the case if, for example, the post
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office is on (or near) the recipient’s route to and from work, or some other daily destination. Accordingly, optimization might consist of such recipients traveling to a post office box regularly to pick up their mail, while the post office continues to deliver to other recipients. To increase profits, USPS cannot, as proposed, (Memoli 2011) raise prices, close branches, reduce delivery days, and continue driving customers to its competitors including the Internet. The alternative would seem to be to change the USPS business model in a fundamental but not unprecedented way, to invest all customers in the goal of reducing USPS impacts and potential public health risks, as described.
This alternative business model would seem to offer major benefits. By reducing the cost of mailing a letter, it will increase USPS business. By pricing delivery subscriptions to cover expenses (plus a little), it might also restore profitability. For all people, most importantly poor people, the price of mailing a letter would become significantly more affordable. For the poor, the price of a delivery subscription also could be subsidized via the tax code or other programs. For all customers, the delivery subscription price could be avoided optionally because customers could opt to pick up their own mail, saving USPS significant energy, equipment, and labor costs of delivering. USPS functions much like a corporation, but officially it is a ‘quasigovernmental agency’ in the Executive Branch. USPS has run up an enormous deficit, exceeding $15 billion for the FY 2012. Under its business model, costs are paid by revenues, not taxes. Evidently, however, this business model is failing, but USPS is “too big to fail.” Taxpayers may be on the hook if it does fail. What USPS needs now is an improved
business model to reverse its decline, not reduction of services because, under the current business model, reducing services only will delay eventual USPS failure. Under the proposed model, essentially, everyone would have a free post office box. This is hardly radical, as most postal customers already have one (although they might be unaware of having one), because the post office uses such boxes to pre-sort mail for allotment to appropriate carriers each morning. Those boxes could be made to face open post office lobbies for those (presumably few) opting to collect their own mail. That is, delivery cost savings to USPS would make some users’ practice of picking up their own mail nearly revenue-neutral. The final benefit consists of improving cost accounting for energy, equipment, and labor, especially associated with delivery to addressees. The choice of buying a delivery subscription vs. picking up one’s own mail would introduce significant efficiencies. Picking up would be more energy- and labor-efficient for people who routinely pass their post offices, for whom essentially zero time and energy would be
required for mail pick-up. To understand the enormous benefit of increasing these efficiencies, consider that USPS currently drives over a billion miles annually and delivers to over 150 million home and business addresses each day, at no charge to this multitude of addressees. The scale of this improvement in efficiency would be enormous with respect to labor costs, equipment costs, and environmental impacts and public health risks associated with fossil fuel use by USPS vehicles.
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Conclusion USPS has been losing business and money. A significant contributor to these prob-
lems is the high price of postage in a digital world in which the value of posting physical letters has been diminished. Reducing the price to mail senders, therefore, reasonably can be expected to restore some or all of historic USPS mailing volume. It also might restore USPS profitability, if revenue lost from reduced-price postage can be recovered, or more than recovered, from customer subscriptions covering mail delivery from local post offices to local addresses. Most USPS customers presumably would continue to receive mail exactly as they previously had received it, delivered to their home or business, but under the proposed USPS business model they would pay for delivery via annual subscriptions. This suggestion constitutes a major, but not unprecedented, change to the USPS business model. Under it, some USPS customers, especially those whose daily travel brings them near their local post office, would opt to pick up their own mail, reducing USPS vehicle use, environmental impacts and potential public health risks, and personnel costs. Overall environmental impacts and public health risks would be reduced, because USPS cus-
tomers picking up their own mail presumably would be predominantly those who routinely make the trip to (or near to) their local post office each day. Social issues such as affordability can be addressed via the tax code or other forms of subsidy to assure that all people have unfettered access to USPS services.
About the author Robert Michaels (ram@ramtrac.com) is the president of Schenectady-based RAM TRAC Corporation and a toxicologist specializing in assessment and management of risks to public health potentially posed by environmental contaminants. He has served numerous corporate clients, the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, and public interest organizations such as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Dr. Michaels chaired the State of Maine Scientific Advisory Panel, and for 20 years chaired the Certification Review Board of the Academy of Board Certified Environmental Professionals (ABCEP). He has been secretary of the NFPA Committee on Classification and Properties of Hazardous Chemicals, board member of the National Association of Environmental Professionals, and member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of Springer-Verlag and Cambridge University Press journals. He earned his doctorate at SUNY at Stony Brook in 1979, and in 2004 was awarded ABCEP’s Kramer Medal recognizing his professional contributions.
ORCID
Robert A. Michaels http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3557-1562
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Austen. I. 2013. Canada to stop delivering mail to city homes over 5 years. The New York Times. December 11, 2013. Hardin, G. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science 162 (3859):1243–1248, doi: 10.1126/science.162.3859.1243, 13 December 1968. Memoli, M. A. 2011. Postal service eyes ‘sweeping’ changes. Albany, NY: Times Union newspaper. September 16, 2011. Murse, T. 2017. Postal service losses by year. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/postalservice-losses-by-year-3321043, 4 pages, updated 1 June 2017; SLS. 2008. The environmental impacts of the mail. Washington, DC; SLS Consulting, https://about. usps.com/what-we-are-doing/green/pdf/USPS-EnvImpacts-of-Mail-LCI-Report-06-08.pdf. Snyder, L. J. 2011. The philosophical breakfast club. New York City, NY: Broadway Books, Crown Publishing Group, Division of Random House. 439 USPS 2016. U.S. Postal Service Reports Fiscal Year 2016 Results. https://about.usps.com/ news/national-releases/2016/pr16_092.htm. USPS 2017. U.S. Postal Service Reports Fiscal Year 2017 Results. https://about.usps.com/news/ national-releases/2017/pr17_069.htm. USPS 2018. United States Postal Service: About. https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postalhistory/first-class-mail-since-1926.htm. USPS 2017. United States Postal Service - FY2017 Annual Report to Congress, including FY2017 Annual Report, FY2017 Comprehensive Statement, FY2017 Performance Report, and FY2018 Performance Plan. https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/annual-reports/ fy2017.pdf. USPS 2018. Postal Facts 2012. U.S. Postal Service, 24 pages. https://about.usps.com/future-postalservice/postalfacts-2012.pdf.
Publication citation
Michaels, RA. The emerging urgency of mitigating environmental impacts and potential public health risks of the United States Postal Service. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, Environmental Claims Journal, 30(2), 142-50, doi: 10.1080/10406026.2018.1442077, (https://doi.org/10.1080/10406026.2018.1442077), online 9 March 2018;