Reduce Junk Mail

green | July 27th, 2009 - 12:01 PM

junk mailSick of all the junk mail piling up in your mailbox and home? While it’s virtually impossible to stop all unwanted mail and catalogs, there are ways to seriously curtail the onslaught. It’s worth the effort, when you consider that junk mail is a colossal waste of time and resources (paper, energy, etc.). The average American household gets 848 pieces of junk mail a year, and we’ll each spend about eight months of our lives dealing with it.

By taking the following steps you can reduce the junk mail ending up in your letterbox and you are helping to minimise water and paper resource waste:

What we call junk mail is actually the result of direct marketing campaigns designed to get you to buy a product or service. It’s called direct marketing because it attempts to match you and your buying preferences with offers that are likely to make you buy a product or service. When you purchase a product or service and give the company your name and address, the chances are you are being added to one or more mailing lists used for direct marketing. This is true when you buy a car or a house, use a shopping card, sign up for a credit card, subscribe to a magazine, buy something from a catalog, give money to a charity, or fill out a product registration form. Your name, address, and other contact information, as well as the type of product or service, is entered into a computer database. The business that collected the information will use it to solicit more business from you. They might also rent their list to other businesses so they can send you advertisements. Lists are valuable, and renting lists is big business.

The easiest and cheapest solution to stopping junk mail doesn’t exist yet.  good start is to register your details on the Consumer Do Not Contact Opt Out Service/Do Not Mail Registry.  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. 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.

Place a No Advertising Material sticker on your letter box. 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.

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.

Report irresponsible distribution of junk mail. Report any junk mail which is littered, delivered in duplicate or delivered to a letterbox with a No Advertising Material sticker on it.

Make a digital choice. Register with online catalogue portals such as Catalogue Central to receive only the advertising material you want. Alternatively you can visit retailers own websites to receive store and brand catalogues online.

If none of the above stop the flow, remember you can recycle glossy magazines, mixed-paper junk mail and newspaper instead of throwing it away.

Junk your junk mail

Banish Junk Mail

Recycle your junk mail

US  Privacy Rights ClearingHouse

Australia : Cleanup Australia

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