Junk Mail No

Matt Moses of Mimeos Sustainability Consultants is a dear and intelligent friend of Farm Feliz.

Matt's home was on our ecotour

Matt Moses

I arrived home one day last month, checked the mail, and was blown away by the amount of junk mail I continue to receive each day. Did I ever order anything from Crate and Barrel? How did I get on the Eastbay Athletics mailing list? One thing I do know is that I do not qualify for AARP membership yet! We did the research a few years ago about junk mail and the facts aren’t pretty. Over 90 million trees are cut down each year for junk mail printing alone. 44% of that junk mail goes right into the garbage, unopened and unread, and NOT recycled. Trying to remove yourself from the dizzying array of list brokers, direct marketers, and national mailing lists can be a truly exhausting process, only to be added again once you buy something or send in your warranty registration.

GET RID OF JUNK MAIL FOR FREE

Catalog Choice (http://www.catalogchoice.org/) is a free service that allows you to manage your receipt of close to 1300 retailer catalogs. It’s a simple process where you can remove yourself from some or all of the catalogs completely, switch to paperless email editions, or find somewhere comfortable in between. It’s a win for all involved. We are able to reduce the clutter and unnecessary waste, retailers save on distribution costs and better target their market, and the reduction of waste, emissions, and felled trees makes an undeniably positive impact on our environment.

GET RID OF JUNK MAIL FOR FEE

For a small fee of $9.00, the Privacy Council (http://privacycouncil.org/about/) will remove you from all of the necessary lists to virtually eliminate your junk mail. They do the legwork that can be painful if you do it yourself. Most of the companies require you to write letters to be removed, and many of them. This might be the option for you!

Please be advised that we do not advocate or endorse either of these solutions. We just found them to be helpful resources that seem to work well.

Finally, the Los Angeles Department of Public Works has a useful junk mail site that is very informative and can guide you through some of the steps if you’d like to take the matter into your own hands. http://ladpw.org/EPD/junkmail/index.cfm

If each of us would only sweep our own doorstep, the whole world would be clean. To Sweep = using a broom, not a gas blower.