The other day I was wheeling my recycling bin out to the curb pleased that it was heavier than the regular garbage bin. Yes, we had done a fantastic job of recycling everything that we could. Every scrap of paper, every qualifying plastic container, can and glass jar. They were all there in the depths of the bin on their way to a second life to become something else.
After some moments of inward self congratulation that at least we were doing what we could not to fill up the landfills, I was struck with the simple fact that no we were not. It would have been better if we had somehow not needed to obtain all these consumables, all these materials that I was now casting away be it in the “good” garbage.
Of what did my proud pile consist? Most of it I came to find was paper: newspapers, catalogs, phone books, brochures, junk mail and cardboard. I thought of the many trees had been cut down, the energy, ink and adhesive that had been wasted to make the various paper products and finally the energy costs to the environment that could never be reclaimed.
After paper is made it must be transported to the first user such as a warehouse, print shop or newspaper office. From there it takes another trip to a store or a distributor before it finally makes its final trip to our home. Paper is heavy and all that transportation requires a lot of fuel.
Most of the things that arrive in our home we glance at for seconds and impatiently discard. We were happy when the town we live in began accepting junk mail envelopes with windows so we then could guiltlessly shred the envelopes in their entirety without the bother of opening them. Let us imagine all the millions of people all over the country needlessly wasting electricity on shredding unwanted junk mail-cumulatively that is a lot of lost energy as well. Lastly, all that heavy, useless paper in our recycle bins that should never have been manufactured, printed and distributed will now have to be collected and driven from our homes to a transfer station or recycling plant. More energy is needed to sort and reuse the paper to make new products. In the end, it is estimated that about 4 million tons of junk mail is sent in the US each year and about half of that is never opened. What a shameful waste!
What can be done to prevent the above unfortunate cycle? Well, one thing that makes a big impact on unsolicited mail is to remove your name from mailing lists. You can do this easily by sending a postcard or letter to: Mail Preference Service, Direct Marketing Association, PO Box 643, Carmel, NY 15012-0643 Include your complete name, address, zip code and simply request that you would like your name removed from their mailing lists. This should stop the majority of junk mail for up to five years. You can also do this online by going to www.dmachoice.org and indicating your preferences. We had been receiving a dozen catalogs a week and within a few months of signing up this stopped almost completely except for the ones we wanted to get. For the few that continued to trickle in I called the company directly and told them to remove our names from their mailing lists.
If you are inundated with credit card offers, this is easy to stop by dialing 1-888-5 OPT OUT (or 1-888-567-8688) 24 hours a day and you can request that your name is not sold by the major credit card agencies and this will stop the generation of unsolicited offers of firm credit to you. A helpful website that offers many suggestions on how to stop unsolicited mail, telephone calls and email can be found at www.obviously.com/junkmail.
Next we changed our billing preferences for all companies we deal with on a regular basis to bill us electronically with a paperless statement via email. We can still print a statement anytime we need to yet for the majority of the time we are eliminating the transportation costs and paper waste of incoming monthly mail not to mention saving the cost of a stamp for every bill paid online.
Thirdly, we decreased the frequency of our newspaper delivery. Since we both enjoy reading the Sunday paper at home but barely have time to read it during the week, we now get delivery twice a week instead of seven. That’s several pounds of paper saved per month alone. News, weather and other information is readily available online when we need it.
Currently we are working on our impulses to buy things. We are trying to get to the place of not needing to own everything-namely books, DVD’s and CD’s. We have started to use the library more. We can borrow media that entices us and then return it in a few weeks. Benefits of this are multi-fold: less items to clutter the house, less cardboard and bags to dispose of if we were to buy all of the above to own and most importantly the practice of borrowing, using and returning satiates or rather replaces the mentality of consuming and collecting.
We have yet to address the phone book issue. Years ago we would get one phone book per year. Now we get five or six and they won’t stop coming. It’s quite easy to Google any number online these days so these monoliths of waste should become a thing of the past or at the very least delivered only upon request. I’m picking up the phone now. I need to have them stop. We’ll see how this battle goes…
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