It is only an experiment, but already it worries the employees of the sector of the diffusion of prospectus. In thirteen local authorities and groups of local authorities, the distribution of unaddressed advertising material has been prohibited since Thursday 1is September for three years, unless a “Oui Pub” sticker is visible on the mailbox. This experiment will concern more than 2 million inhabitants, in particular those of the city of Bordeaux and the metropolis of Grenoble. They will then be joined by the agglomerations of Troyes and Dunkirk, where the ban will come into force on 1is February 2023.
This experiment is the result of the Climate and Resilience Law of 2021, which partially takes up a proposal from the Citizens’ Convention for the Climate, which wanted to limit the waste of paper due to advertising leaflets. At the end of the test period, an evaluation committee will be set up “in order to assess the impact of the experiment on the production and processing of paper waste, its consequences on employment, on the sectors of activity concerned, on consumer behavior, but also on any difficulties in generalization of such a measure”, explained the Ministry of Ecological Transition, in early May, in a press release. Six months before the end of the experiment, a parliamentary report will have to draw up an assessment, specifying if the generalization of the device is desirable or not, still makes known the ministry in its press release.
800,000 tons of unsolicited printed matter
According to the Ministry of Ecological Transition, the quantity of unsolicited printed matter represents nearly 800,000 tonnes in France, or 12 kilos of leaflets per inhabitant and 30 kilos per household on average each year.
In detail, printed advertising represents 89% of these quantities, the rest being made up of 5% commercial catalogs, 4% community press and 2% free advertising newspapers. And despite the “Stop-Pub” stickers, introduced in 2004 and pasted on around a third of mailboxes, “a significant portion of this ad is discarded unread”noted the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (Ademe) in an “Advertising and environment” report, published in 2020.
Risk of social damage
The implementation of the “Oui Pub” system worries professionals in this sector: nearly 20,000 in France work in difficult conditions. Many employees in the sector are precarious and hired part-time, which makes their retraining difficult.
A year ago, there were still 18,000 at Adrexo. Today, there are only 13,000. At Mediapost, the only other player in the distribution of advertising in France, there are 8,100 distributors according to the CFDT, or 3,000 less than three years ago. For their part, the main producers of printed catalogs are preparing to reduce their printing volume.