Monday, April 26, 2010

Go green by putting your mail box on a diet

That pile of junk mail is doing a lot more than just weighing down your mailbox, it’s also adding to the growing amount of paper waste and if you are wanting to go green you should think about opting out. Opting out that is of the plethora of mailing lists you somehow wound up on (Don’t feel too bad not all of them you consciously enrolled in but they gained your address by other means!) and deciding to go paperless on what you can.

If you haven’t yet heard about it, a growing number of banks, utility companies, phone carriers, and other outlets are offering to their customers the option to receive their bills and notices via email rather than standard post. What this means is that you can cut out the amount of needless paper and being that email is fast outpacing traditional methods you will probably wind up paying that bill earlier.

Now that may take care of a marginal amount of your mail load but to really go green you need to be persistent and get rid of those leaflets proclaiming that you could get a certain magazine at an amazing deal or to be alerted that you are preapproved of the BEST credit card in the world (Trust me you don’t need another card with extra fees). Yes, easier said than done but it won’t take too long; many of those notices will include a telephone number you can call to get off the list; look in the very fine print. You can also submit yourself to the Direct Marketing Association’s Mail Preference Service as an address in the DMA category: Do Not Mail. If you still are receiving trash and you haven’t got the time to continue to hunt down the offenders you can pay someone else to take care of it for you. There are services that you can find online to do that and two such organizations are 41 Pounds and Green Dimes.

Taking it to the magazines and other catalogues you may get you should unsubscribe to those you really don’t read; if it is catalogues, much of the same if not more items are now found on the business’s website. For those magazines that you do keep, once you are through think about if you have a friend who might enjoy reading them and pass them that way; you could even buddy up with friends who have similar reading habits and share subscriptions to really go green. For what mail you then do receive and keep be sure that it eventually finds its way back to the proper recycling bin. Once you’ve given your mailbox a diet you and the planet will benefit.

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