It's the daily routine. You go to the mailbox. You pull out your one actual piece of mail (if you're lucky) and five pieces of junk mail. All that paper, day after day, going into the recycling bin. (It is being recycled, isn't it?) But recycling is an imperfect and inefficient solution to the flood of unwanted paper.
How do you make it all stop?
First of all, you should follow the advice you'll find on most "green" blogs (as well as sources concerned with identity protection). Contact these two important allies in your fight against junk mail if you have not already: the Direct Marketing Association and OptOutPrescreen.com. Fast, simple, centralized.
But that doesn't stop all the junk mail. Every afternoon after checking the mail, I get online for two minutes and send "please take my address off your mailing list" emails. It's easy to do. Start by googling the company and going to their official website. [On every good company site, there should be a "Contact Us" link. Most of the time, this link is in an obvious place. Try the small print on the top of the page, or scroll all the way down to the footer.] I've had lots of affirmative responses from this process and have gotten off many lists quickly and painlessly.
If you can't stand to do it everyday, keep all your junk mail from the whole week and type out all your emails all at once. If you're smart, you'll just copy and paste your little message into each company's form. It'll only take you ten minutes, maximum, and you'll feel empowered by the directness of this method.
To go the extra step, consider contacting the organizations you previously wanted mail from. All your statements from financial institutions can and should be delivered online. Also email the catalogues you once requested and tell them to take you off their list because you now do all your business with them online. They really like that one. It saves them some money, and many recognize it's helping the environment, too.
For just minutes a day, you'll quickly see the benefits of slowing your deluge of junk mail into a trickle.
Update (8-6-08): An excellent post about junk mail from Low Impact Living today. It encourages you to check out 41pounds.org, GreenDimes, and Stopthejunkmail.com.
Image from http://www.noambizman.com/2007_12_01_archive.html
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2 comments:
If you don't find the information on the contact us page, always look for the websites privacy policy. All the reputable companies will have a privacy policy and tell you how to opt-out. I did this for awhile and it took way too much time so to Stop Junk Mailo I have a membership with MyJunkTree and was able to do it all in one place. I stopped the weekly mailers, credit card offers, misc junk mail, phone books and all the catalogs I no longer wanted. It was so much easier to use these guys then do all the work myself. I log-in and click the items I want to stop.
If you want to do more than just Stop Junk Mail that comes to your home, this site might also be of interest to you. Stopping Free Papers. It is a free service and they help you stop the delivery of all the free papers that are thrown in your driveway. The site is sponsored by MyJunkTree and it is totally free!
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