Reduce your junk mail

Submitted by Barbara on Wed, 09/16/2009 - 22:19

We used stopjunkmail.org

They have a number of different methods you can use to eliminate junk mail depending on what type of junk mail you get.

This is from their front page:

"It takes 17 trees to make a ton of paper. That means nearly 100 million trees get used for junk mail every year in the U.S. Let's keep the trees in the forest, and get the junk mail out of your life."

We dont do any of our shopping by mail order so we dont get many catalogues.  That wasnt the problem.  On the other hand, I like getting the grocery adds, cupons and the occasional promotion from local businesses.  I feel these are important because we should patronize local businesses and it allows us to connect with small businesses in our area rather than defaulting to big name chains.  So it wasnt worth out time to fill out all of the forms to get taken off various major marketing lists.  If you do get these types of catalouges and other junk, here is a page for you.

I also like having a small amount of newpaper around the house as raw materials for cleaning mirrors, windows and laying down under messy art projects.

What we really needed to get rid of were the endless loan, credit card, and mortgage solicitation.  They were making up about half of our junk mail and they are really hard to dispose of.  Credit applications needed to be shredded (energy & time), they always had plastic windows (extra pollution) and had little reuse value.  They are also a blight to the average American who finds themselves in ever increasing debt.

So we did the "opt out" for credit marketing.  Did you know there is an opt out for credit marketing?  I didnt but it turned out to be just the right thing for us.  Its about half way donw this page.  We dont get any of this junk now and its been such a blessing.