One Habit at a Time – Reduce Junk Mail


Does your daily ritual include sifting through the mail and throwing half of it, unread, into your recycling box?  What’s wrong with this picture?  Junk mail not only wastes our time and patience, it’s an environmental issue. According to www.forestethics.org:

Each year, catalog retailers mail out more than 20 billion catalogs…Almost none of this paper contains any recycled content. Every year, over 8 million tons of trees go straight into catalogs alone—most of which are unread and discarded. Catalogs and junk mail are needlessly consuming North America’s most valuable forest regions and filling our overburdened landfills.

Catalogs and junk mail are a significant contributor to climate change. Junk mail now constitutes more than half the total volume of US mail…The industry requires transport, printing and other energy-intensive resources—all for a response rate of less than three percent! According to US Department of Energy, the pulp and paper sector is the third largest carbon-emitting sector in the US, after the petroleum and chemical sectors.
 

According to www.cityofpaloalto.org/depts/pwd/news/details.asp?NewsID=368&TargetID=179
*   We use about 52 million trees and 25 billion gallons of water to produce one year’s worth of this country’s junk mail.
*   An average of 41 pounds of junk mail is sent to every adult each year.  About 44 percent of this goes unread and directly into the garbage. The average adult is on 50 mailing lists.
      

How can we stop this nonsense? Palo Alto offers a FREE printed Junk Mail Reduction Kit with pre-addressed cards, available by calling (650)496-5910 or emailing recycling@cityofpaloalto.org. Its website (noted above) has a great list of steps to follow to minimize your junk mail. Also:
*   www.catalogchoice.org allows you to be removed from a long list of catalogs.
*   www.StopJunkMail.org  (1-877-STOPWASTE) has a Stop Junk Mail Kit

Start a new daily ritual. Before recycling those unwanted pieces of mail, respond to them. Call the 800 number, email, use their postage-paid envelope or your own pre-stamped postcard (28 cents at the Post Office) to request to be removed from mailing lists. If you want to stay in contact with a group, try to switch to an email list.

Incidentally, some methods that don’t work:
*   Writing “Return to Sender” or “Refusal” or “Deceased” on unsolicited mail only results in the USPS discarding it, since they don’t forward third class bulk mail.
*   Trying to get the attention of a company by returning their junk mail in an envelope with insufficient postage.
*   Registering with the National Do Not Call List, since it is a government service available only to those who use telemarketing. There is no similar list for direct mail (and why not?!)

Fending off junk mail takes diligence, but should pay off within a few months. Don’t have the time? www.Greendimes.org  will do it for you for a fee of $20.  See, there’s no excuse!
 

First Presbyterian Church of Palo Alto
www.fprespa.org/coolplanet
March, 2008