They are every bride’s dream and are so sought after people are willing to pay absorbent amounts for very small qualities. Poets and bards have glamorized these tiny powerhouses in word and song throughout history. No, they are not celebrities, although they have been in movies, and they are not rock stars even though they are rocks. Marilyn Monroe said it best in her movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with the famous song Diamonds are A Girls Best Friend.

Over $8 billion of Diamonds are mined every year. Approximately 250 tons of ore must be mined and processed to produce a single one-carat, polished, gem quality diamond. 100 million carats are mined each year, but only a quarter of these will be considered gem quality. That is one reason diamonds are so rare and expensive.

Diamonds are not all glamour and glitter. Diamonds are used for certain industrial applications and in some areas of the world children and adults under extreme conditions mine Diamonds. These are called Conflict Diamonds or Blood Diamonds.



Diamonds are found all over the world, but 80% of all diamonds come from just seven sources: Angola, Australia, Botswana, Namibia, Russia, South Africa and Zaire. Most Blood Diamonds come from Western Africa and other worn torn areas. Blood Diamonds may be forever but the lives lost mining them are not.

Figures I have seen indicate that approximately 20 billion catalogs are printed and distributed in the U.S. every year. That’s about 60 catalogs for each person in the U.S. If my own mail is any indication, I would say that is accurate.

It would be funny if it didn’t affect the environment so much. Computers and the Internet were supposed to take us into a paperless society, but it seems we use more paper than ever. When you consider that online sales in the U.S. were $4.5 billion in 2007, you wonder why we need so many catalogs. I am not sure we need them all but I know why they are printed. This statement by a marketing research company says it all.

Marketing Vox
“The paper catalog is still the largest revenue generator — some 50 percent of sales in both 2007 and 2008 — among all channels used by companies that sell goods to consumers and businesses from a remote location, though web sales continue to grow, a new study finds.”

I think it is safe to say that most of the catalogs printed are pretty much tossed before they are read. You would think the catalog-marketing folks would find it more cost effective to be more discerning with their distributions. Perhaps we need an opt-in list as we do with email, or maybe there is a better idea for the use for all those catalogs.

 What if we had the catalog people print catalogs on a soft paper using soy ink. That way we could recycle the paper by using it as toilet paper. They did that a hundred years ago using the regular paper, but hey were hardier people. They also used corncobs. Yeiks!

I think I am on to something here. J