Along with more heavily researched issues, I want to post some concise entries that deal with “easy actions” you can take to curb waste and reduce your environmental impact. Reducing junk mail has never been an issue I thought I had any control over, but an article in the NY Times has me thinking otherwise.
Statistics:
- The average American household receives 26 pieces of junk mail per week
- An estimated 100 million trees are harvested annually to produce 4.5 million tons of junk mail
- 44% of junk mail is thrown away unopened
In 2003, U.S. congress passed a bill initiating a national “do not call” list that households could join, making it illegal for solicitors to call those numbers. A number of companies have latched on to this concept for junk mail, charging you a small annual fee ($15-30) to initiate and maintain a process that will cut your junk mail by up to 90%. One company, Greendimes, has over 50,000 customers and claims to have stopped almost 2 million pounds of junk mail from being sent.
Environmentally speaking, reducing your junk mail intake saves trees, a massive amount of water (strangely enough), and gasoline spent trucking it all around. Listed below are three companies working toward the same goal of curbing junk mail for its customers:
I plan to choose one of these three companies this week and join. Are you interested in doing the same?
* All statistics and information taken from the following NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/business/smallbusiness/06sbiz.html
Comments
Absolutely, I’m interest in joining — didn’t know there was a mail equivalent of Do Not Call (by the way, the Do Not Call list expires next year and we’ll all have to sign up again). If the average number of weekly junk mail pieces is 26, we must receive 52 — sometimes if we miss one day of clearing out our mailbox, the mailman has to take our stuff back to the Ralph McGill Post Office because there’s no room left. Most of our daily mail is junk. A terrible waste of paper, excessive work for postal people, and frequently the junk mail is unethical, criminal, or immoral, imploring you to open another charge account or go with some fly-by-night loan company.
Well, I think all those thousands of spam comments should be gone now. However, it looks like I removed some legitimate comments in the process of cleaning things up. Yow. Sorry bout that!
(Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain)
Thanks Kathleen! I will definitely keep this in mind. In the past I’ve been pretty successful and curbing my junk mail by having very few subscriptions and making sure to tell companies who do have my address not to send me anything. I’m thinking that might not be so easy now that I’m in a house…I’m a bit hesitant to pay someone to do something it seems I could do myself, but maybe it’s worth it :). and if I could sign up all the rest of my household for them, that could be worth it too :).
Hi Kathleen-
Thank you for including GreenDimes in your post about junk mail! We really appreaciate your taking the time to tell others about our services. Make sure you check the site from time to time and see what new ideas and projects we are working on to help make the world a better place. Take good care and thanks again for your post.
Best,
Kendra
www.greendimes.com
This is something I’ve been meaning to do for so long, and your post motivated me to actually do it! I poked around online to see if I could find a free service and this is what I came up with. Here’s a link to the Direct Marketing Association website (https://www.dmachoice.org/MPS/) and the Consumer Credit Reporting Companies website (https://www.optoutprescreen.com/opt_form.cgi). At the DMA site for $1 you can get off junk mail lists and on the CCRC site you can “opt-out” of receiving pre-approved credit card offers for $0. I don’t know how it’ll compare to the fee-based services but I’m going to give it a try and see how much it cuts down.
Thanks for your thoughtful posts, Kathleen.
Yay, let’s do it! I want a spam filter for our snail mail box! In the spirit of full disclosure, I see that there ~is~ a way to do this yourself–but after a quick look at the loooong list of steps that are required, it definitely looks worth a small fee to subscribe to one of these services to get it done and to help promote the cause.
I didn’t know such companies existed. Good for them. And as it states on the Stop the Junk Mail site, it’s clearly worth the small outlay for the service they provide. A few thoughts / questions.
“The DMA [Direct Mareketing Association] requires an additional one-time $1 processing fee per name.” So they want to get paid, NOT to send you mail. Damn. Nice work if you can get it. I find this seriously objectionable. (Per the “How it works” page on the Green Dimes site.)
I wonder how the Post Office / paper producers / water suppliers feel about attempts to reduce physical junk mail and how they will (inevitably) try to counter these efforts, sad as it is to contemplate.
“44% of junk mail is thrown away unopened.” An irreverent remark first: how do they know that?! Is someone sifting through the refuse tips keeping a tally! On a more serious note, I’m surprised how low that number is from personal experience. I suspect I’ve read as little as 10% of the junk mail that comes through my mailbox and acted on about 0.25%.
Not that this counts at all against slapping down the junk mailers, but email providers have spam filters installed (to varying degrees of success although gmail’s and yahoo’s are excellent). If the junk mail providers are pushed out of their physical business (which they should be, don’t get me wrong), how long before they incentivise the electronic versions of the Post Office to make those spam filters a little less efficient?
Keep up the good work Kathleen!