Junk your junk mail
Use these nine tips to help
save some of the 100 million trees chopped down annually to produce junk mail
in the United States:
- Register your name with the Direct Marketing
Association’s Mail Preference Service. After you do this, the
DMA will add you to its “Do Not Mail” database.
- If you do business with a company via mail services, it will put
you on its contact list. So the first time you make a transaction (such as
placing an order) with that company, ask to be put on its “in-house suppress” or “do not
promote” lists. Tell the company not to
“rent” or share your name with other companies.
- To stop junk mail from credit card, mortgage, and insurance
companies, try going to OptOutPreScreen.com
which allows you to remove your name from lists generated by the four
major credit bureaus– Equifax, Innovis, TransUnion, and Experian.
- Get the Stop the
Junk Mail Kit from the Consumer Research Institute. This
kit comes with pre-addressed postcards for you to send to companies that
send you those annoying catalogs, wasteful postcards, and unnecessary
brochures.
- Several subscription services will reduce your
junk mail for you. You can
pay a fee to join Stop the Junk Mail which offers an online service to
reduce junk mail. Also, check out GreenDimes - for a dime a day, this service will
reduce your junk mail and plant a tree in your name every month.
- If you’re fed up with other types of junk (faxes, email, phone calls,
etc.), take a look at JunkBusters.com.
- Try calling the phone number listed under the publisher details on the junk mail.
Often if you call or email, the company will remove you from the mailing
list for a publication.
Yahoo! Green invites you to:
Kick the catalogs
Reduce the number of catalogs jamming your mailbox by 75%. We’ll show you how to do it, and lower your CO2 emissions by 30 lbs this year.
Challenge provided by Carbonrally
- If you’ve done everything above and there’s still a trickle of junk
still getting through, try one of
these “Return to Waster” stamps,
stamp the junk, and put it into a mailbox. Unless the marketer paid for first-class
mail, the the junk isn’t likely to make it back to the company; stamping
the junk is more of an act of protest. The more people who do it, however,
the more attention the issue will get.
- And if, after all that, a few pieces of junk mail get through, try
upcycling. Turn your junk mail
into pieces of art,
bookmarks, packing materials, envelopes, and more.
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