A supercharged green tip: Stop junk mail!
My desk sits 10 feet from my front door, and each day I see the postal person making rounds. I sigh when I receive a big packet of local ads almost every day, and those go directly into the recycle bin.
I was under the impression that the postal people just had a pile that they had to give out to each household, so I asked the deliverer to stop blessing me with the flyers.
Turns out they’re all individually addressed, so he’s legally required to deliver them! But here’s the great part…. he showed me that each packet has the name, address and website of the distributor, usually buried on the outside cover that holds together all the looseleaf ads. Yesterday I dug through my recycle bin and found three different distributors, and I wrote to all to remove my name.
Yahoo!
My goal in the next week or so is to create a little flyer for my neighbors, telling them how they, too, can unsubscribe and identifying the sites and addresses they need. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the post people could skip the flyers for my whole block?!?
Gosh but I love reducing paper waste…. (I know — proof yet again that I need to get out more).
A couple of other green tips:
Want to get rid of catalogs and other junk mail? Check out GreenDimes.
Aveda salons are collecting the caps from plastic bottles, etc. — Not many recycling systems will take them.
Carissa on 11 Sep 2008 at 12:09 pm #
Imagine how happy your postal worker will be to not have to haul all that extra paper around especially if you get your entire block to do it! I’m going to make it happen for my building! Thanks!
I am Aveda JUNKIE! Thanks for the recycling tip on plastic bottle caps.
Tim on 23 Sep 2008 at 9:26 am #
I happen to be one of the owners of MyJunkTree and as a new company I search the web to see if we are getting any visibility out there and I post n relevant Blogs.
We launched the company because we were tired of all the junk mail we were receiving and we personally did not want to bounce all over the web to contact all the different companies to stop it all. First and foremost we wanted to let people choose what they wanted to let come to their home knowing that some people really do like some of the coupons and catalogs. So our clients choose what they want stopped.
We also had to provide a service that is different than the other services out there, so here is what we offer:
1. We have a database of over 1300 catalogs that you can choose to stop.
2. We have over a 4000 charities/Non-Profits that you can stop solicitations from.
3. Stop the delivery of the national phone directories.
4. Stop the delivery of the weekly coupons.
5. Stop the general credit card offers as well as the ones from your own major bank.
6. Stop the miscellaneous junk mail from the data brokers.
7. You can register on the National Do Not Call Registry from the website.
8. You can order your no strings attached free annual credit report right from the website.
9. We plant trees with every new membership.
And, yes we are a paid service and yes you can do everything that we do for free, if you want to do all the research and spend the time contacting the companies yourself it can easily be done. We have just done all of the legwork for our clients and feel there is value in the service we provide. So check out MyJunkTree and make difference in our mailbox.
Tim on 25 Nov 2008 at 4:42 am #
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!