Stop junk mail for good

The Internet hasn't slowed down the tree killers. But you can use it to keep their catalogs and credit card applications at bay.

By Liz Galst

Read more: Environment, Science, Climate Change, Life, The Good Life

Dec. 17, 2007 | You'd think that with all the spam floating around the Internet these days, good old-fashioned junk mail, the kind that clogs your home's mailbox and the nation's landfills, might be a thing of the past.

Alas, that is not to be. The amount of direct mail that catalog companies, Internet purveyors, and coupon captains send out each year continues to climb, up from 90.5 billion pieces in 2003 to a whopping 103.5 billion pieces in 2007, according to the U.S. Postal Service. "It's a colossal waste," says Kristi Chester Vance, communications director of ForestEthics, a group that has worked to reduce the environmental impact of the catalog industry.

In fact, the annual greenhouse-gas emissions from the production of junk mail are equal to those of 3.5 million cars. (That figure doesn't include emissions from transporting and disposing of the stuff.) Beyond that, each year junk mail production in the U.S. consumes more than 96.7 billion gallons of water and more than 100 million trees, ForestEthics estimates. Most of those, says Chester Vance, come from carbon-dioxide-sequestering, biologically diverse old-growth forests, rather than from sustainably managed tree farms. And according to the Environmental Protection Agency, only about a third of all junk mail is recycled. "All that for a response rate of less than 3 percent," Chester Vance notes, referring to the fact that fewer than 3 percent of people -- often even fewer -- respond to the solicitations.

Junk mail has nonenvironmental problems too. It exposes you to identity theft and is just a drag to sort through. If you spend five minutes a day dealing with junk mail -- shredding credit card offers, for instance -- you blow a full 30 hours a year. Time you could use to write the great American novel, hang out with your kids, or gaze up at the stars.

Usually your name and address end up on junk mail lists because you've purchased something with a credit card, subscribed to a magazine, or listed your name and address on the application for a store's discount card. Merchants sell your information to others. You may have tried stopping your junk mail in the past, perhaps by contacting the Direct Marketing Association, the largest industry trade group, to little or no avail.

But fighting the junk mail hydra requires a multipronged approach, one that environmental groups and Internet-based service providers are taking up in equal measures. Now, several paid and some free services can effectively stop between 80 and 95 percent of all that mailbox clutter.

One such service is the Palo Alto, Calif.-based GreenDimes.com. For a $15 one-time fee, GreenDimes will "contact a dozen or so direct-mail groups on your behalf," says general manager Dan Estabrook. GreenDimes instructs these groups, which compile and sell names to countless companies and banks, to remove your name and address -- including past residents and the omnipresent "current resident" -- from their databases. GreenDimes also monitors the DMA's distribution list on a monthly basis to make sure your name is not included. "On the catalog side, we communicate directly with thousands of catalog companies, indicating that you've authorized us to remove your name," Estabrook says.

GreenDimes' coverage should last for three to five years, he estimates. If you move, you need to re-up. Like other services, GreenDimes allows consumers to choose, for the life of the membership, which catalogs they'd like to receive and which they'd like to stop. And with each new membership, the group plants 10 trees through tree-planting groups American Forests, Sustainable Harvest International, and Trees for the Future.

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