In the weeks leading up to our decision to start Sustainability Saturday I found myself feeling desperate to take action on behalf of our environment. I felt surrounded by wasted paper and unnecessary plastic. One of the places that frustrated me was my mailbox. We get an absolutely absurd amount of junk mail! Sorting through it is a waste of time and it’s a senseless waste of paper.

I found a Washington Post article that listed the best ways to reduce this sort of unwanted mail marketing. According to their research, junk mail still thrives because it is actually somewhat effective, so unfortunately it isn’t going to go away. If you dislike it as much as I do, you’ll have to take action yourself!

Why does junk mail suck?

In case you aren’t already fully on the “junk mail sucks” band wagon, I’m going to make a pitch in hopes that you’ll join me. Here are a few stats from the Washington Post article that really stood out to me:

• The average American spends 8 months of their life sorting junk mail
• The average American receives an average of 41 pounds of junk mail per year
• And worst of all, 5.6 million tons of junk mail ends up in American landfills annually

How do we stop the junk mail madness?

According to the Washington Post article, there are a handful of steps that you can take to reduce your unwanted mail. I followed the main steps listed and it took me about 7-10 minutes total. For the most part I was able to put our home address on the “do not contact” lists so it would cover mail addressed to me and to Mike. There were, however, two steps that Mike needed to replicate to ensure that his name was covered as well (i.e., DMAChoice and optoutprescreen).

Little by little . . .

One thing to note is that it does take a while to see a noticeable difference in mail marketing quantity. I didn’t start seeing a decrease until approximately the 8 week mark. We’re still getting more than I’d like, but it’s definitely trending downward. Maybe we’ll only receive 20 pounds of unwanted mail this year? At least it’s progress!

Save the trees. Save your time. Both are too precious to be squandered.

xo, Nicole