Junk Mail is Driving Me Crazy

We get so much junk mail, it isn't even funny. I can't believe all of these companies have found us after we only moved in a year ago. Last night, I pretty much took the entire contents of our mailbox and shuffled them directly to our recycle bin.

I found this interesting statistic: Did you know?
Each year, 19 billion catalogs are mailed to American
consumers. What’s the impact?
Number of trees used – 53 million trees
Pounds of paper used – 3.6 million tons of paper
Energy used to produce this volume of paper – 38 trillion BTUs, enough to power 1.2 million homes per year
Contribution to global warming – 5.2 million tons of carbon dioxide
emissions, equal to the annual emissions of two million cars
Waste water discharges from this volume of paper – 53 billion gallons of water, enough to fill 81,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools

How can you stop junk mail? I did a Google search and will have to follow up with the results in a few weeks. There were a lot of options you actually had to pay for, but I found Catalog Choice that allows you pick and choose the catalogs you do and don't want to receive for free. Kind of a pain, since you can't do a blanket "stop sending ALL catalogs to my house," you have to pick and choose. You really have to work hard, apparently, to get your name off these lists. There has to be a better option out there to stop this stuff. Smart Money offers some tips here. More tips here. I opted out of at least 30 catalogs on Catalog Choice, the credit card offers for 5 years through Experian, Equifax, etc. and the Abacus Catalog Alliance for one. I am going to call and ask to be taken off the ValPak list. We'll see what happens. This would be a great sweeps story for a local TV station. See if you can beat the junk mail monster...

Rant of the day over... Peace!

AC: Peace