Stop the invasion of junk mail- before it’s too late!
First, some info from the Native Forest Network’s Guide to Stopping Junk Mail:
- The average person gets only 1.5 personal letters each week, compared to 10.8 pieces of junk mail.
- Each person will receive almost 560 pieces of junk mail this year.
- That’s 4.5 million tons of junk mail produced each year!
- 44% of all junk mail is thrown in the trash, unopened and unread.
- Approximately 40% of the solid mass that makes up our landfills is paper and paperboard waste.
- By the year 2010, it is predicted to make up about 48%.
- 100 million trees are ground up each year to produce junk mail.
- Lists of names and addresses used in bulk mailings are in mass data-collection networks, compiled from phone books, warranty cards, and charity donations (to name a few).
- Your name is typically worth 3 to 20 cents each time it is sold.
No Impact Man, my hero, has taken the necessary steps recommended by the Native Forest Network to reduce his use, so to speak.
So here’s what I’m doing to stop the tree killers and keep their trash out of my bin:
1. All the junk mail, including that with plastic windows in the envelopes, goes in the recycling bin. For a guide to recycling in your community, go here.
2. I got my name off the credit card and insurance offer lists by going to the credit bureaus’ centralized service for opting out.
3. I spent a dollar—swear to God, that’s the price—to sign onto the Direct Marketing Association’s Mail Preference Service, which reportedly will reduce my junk mail by 75%.
4. I began calling the 800 number on the catalogs and asking them to take me off their lists
5. Since I first wrote this post in February, my junk mail has reduced but not minimized. I’m now going to try a paid service called Green Dimes, which promises to get rid of junk mail for $36 a year (one green dime a day). If Green Dimes does what it claims, parting with the cash means you don’t have to take all the steps above (except recycling, of course!), because Green Dimes does it for you.
Meanwhile, a couple of websites tell you how to make your own recycled paper from junk mail, but well, I’m too busy baking bread from local wheat and washing Isabella’s locally-grown, organic cotton diapers. God save me, please, from myself and this crazy project.
Will No Impact Man be able to cut his own consumption rate before Global Warming, left mostly unchallenged, drags us all to our final fiery fate? Will you?
(Cross-posted at YOUTHinkLeft)
Ramsey Fahel said,
May 23, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Do Not Mail Opt-Out Law would be fair to everyone.
The proposed recent “Do not mail” is an Opt-Out law. Only those not desiring advertising mail need opt-out. Anyone desiring advertising mail can do nothing - and continue to receive it. Why deny those wishing to avoid advertising mail the power to do so?
I do not consider handling unwanted advertising placed against my will on my personal property to be a civic obligation!
The US Supreme Court said in the Rowan case in 1970, ““In today’s [1970] complex society we are inescapably captive audiences for many purposes, but a sufficient measure of individual autonomy must survive to permit every householder to exercise control over unwanted mail. To make the householder the exclusive and final judge of what will cross his threshold undoubtedly has the effect of impeding the flow of ideas, information, and arguments that, ideally, he should receive and consider. Today’s merchandising methods, the plethora of mass mailings subsidized by low postal rates, and the growth of the sale of large mailing lists as an industry in itself have changed the mailman from a carrier of primarily private communications, as he was in a more leisurely day, and have made him an adjunct of the mass mailer who sends unsolicited and often unwanted mail into every home. It places no strain on the doctrine of judicial notice to observe that whether measured by pieces or pounds, Everyman’s mail today is made up overwhelmingly of material he did not seek from persons he does not know. And all too often it is matter he finds offensive.”
Furthermore, the Supreme Court said, “the mailer’s right to communicate is circumscribed only by an affirmative act of the addressee giving notice that he wishes no further mailings from that mailer.
To hold less would tend to license a form of trespass and would make hardly more sense than to say that a radio or television viewer may not twist the dial to cut off an offensive or boring communication and thus bar its entering his home. Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit; we see no basis for according the printed word or pictures a different or more preferred status because they are sent by mail.”
We need a nationwide “Do Not Mail” law to create a one-stop, convenient place for homeowners to give senders the aforementioned affirmative notice that we do not want certain kinds of mail sent to our homes.
http://www.newdream.org/emails/ta19.html
Signed,
Ramsey A Fahel
Solar Powered Advertising « Our Descent Into Madness said,
June 21, 2007 at 12:40 pm
[...] know that outrage on behalf of the ever-encroaching flood of junk mail has been previously discussed, but this seems to be a step in the right direction. If we can combine sustainability with the [...]