How can we reduce the amount of wated paper (junk mail)?

Question

Everyone gets it. Most just throw it away. This is a waste of trees and landfill space. The two ways i found to reduce this is 1) sign up for paperless billing, and 2) tell your credit card company that you do not wish to give your address/info to other companies (most credit card companies have this option, but it is hard to find). Any other ideas?

Answer 1

What I do to try and lessen the impact of the junk mail I get is to make sure to recycle it all so it doesn't go into the landfills.  I don't know how common is to have places that recycle junk mail but I know in DE there is a bin for it at the state park near my house.

Answer 2

Lmao  : Great idea Big Jon . I'm going through my junk mail now i have a box full of it .

Answer 3

Go with Big Jon's answer.

Of course paper decomposes rapidly, so worrying about it filling up land fills is not much of an issue.  The main thing that clogs landfills are plastics.

Answer 4

I completely agree with you. These companies rendering tons of junk mail everyday need to be fined heavily, or none of this will stop.

Answer 5

Recycle it.

To stop it from coming?  Most companies sending out junk mail, regardless of type, usually include a return envelope for your reply to their offer.  Postage paid.  Just take as much of your junk mail as you can stuff into the envelope and mail it back to them full of other companies' offers.  It may take a couple of times doing this, but you will soon be removed from their mailing list.  Especially as they will have to pay ADDITIONAL postage due to the weight of the envelope.

Answer 6

There are a number of services now in the U.S. that will purge your name from a number of national mailing lists and even block it from being added to new ones for a nominal fee -- about $20.00.  Most of these groups are green based (non profit as well) and turn about 75% of the fee they charge back around into eco-friendly groups.

The links below should provide a few other ideas on eliminating junk mail and even some "gorilla" tactics to make the junk mailers lose significant money for bothering you.

Answer 7

It can be a long, complicated process.

There are a couple generic lists that you want to be on:

https://www.optoutprescreen.com/

https://www.dmachoice.org/MPS/

Anything that comes with your address actually written on it, is either covered by one of the above lists, or you need to contact the sender specifically and ask them to stop mailing you. You pretty much need to contact every organization you know or that knows about you and tell them to not send you mail and to not sell or rent your name to others.

If it's just addressed "Postal Customer" or "Resident" and doesn't actually include your address, they paid the Post Office to deliver to every address on the route that you're on, so even if you contact the company sending it they can't take you off the list.

If a mailer won't stop, fill out Form 1500 and attach it to the mail and bring it to a Post Office or mail it to the address on the form. It's designed for offensive material, and the courts have decided that *you* get to pick what's offensive. I find a lot of my junk mail to be offensive. The form is available at larger post offices and at http://www.usps.gov/.

Any mail you get in the meantime, feel free to simply not accept. Mark it "Refused" and give it back to the Postal Service. See http://www.refuseyourmail.info/ for more information. They still essentially throw it away, but I hope that if enough people do it the Postal Service might take notice that people just aren't going to accept delivery of junk mail anymore.

There are some online subscription services that try to automate this process somewhat and act as your agent in getting off of the lists that you want to get off of. But I haven't tried any, so I am hesitent to recommend any.

Hope this helps.