I am continually annoyed at the amount of advertisement mail that is sent to individuals via the US Postal Service. It seems that in their struggle to stay pertinent within a world which has many venues for communication and the shipping of parcels that they have become simply a business of waste. I have lived in several apartment complexes in the last few years. There was always a trash can full of advertising mailers which was filled every week. This amounts to hundreds of pounds of excess material each month and tons of material every year. Multiplied across all of the individuals that receive unsolicited mail this is an enormous amount of paper material on the order of hundreds of millions of tons. This is just stupid.
When I asked a US Postal Service employee how I could opt-out of unsolicited mailers I was told that I could not. Ridiculous. I don't even really care if they charge me more due to loss of advertising revenue. Just stop it. It goes without saying that most of us like trees a whole lot more than we like unsolicited junk mail. I propose that unsolicited mail be banned from delivery and fines be levied against those that send it. A 'do not send me junk mail' list is not appropriate or sufficient. Instead an opt-in system should be created where I can choose to opt in to mailers in general or I can opt-in just for specific mailers from specific companies and groups, or I can even have a set of preferences that detail what type of material would be most suited to my interests. Laws protecting consumers and the environment need to be created and enforced. An opt-in system, both for physical mail, phone solicitation, and email solicitation needs to be implemented. It is far too wasteful to continue wasting our time, energy, and natural resources on such trivially stupid cultural missteps.
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Update:
A couple of things that you can do to prevent yourself from receiving junk mail:
- Update your Direct Marketing Association preferences: DMA's Mail Preference Service
- Opt out of pre-screened credit card offers: OptOutPrescreen.com
- Because telemarketing just sucks: DoNotCall.gov
I was amazed at the mis-information presented on the DMA website during the opt-out process. The suggestion that receiving junk mail is environmentally friendly due to increased shopping from home is stupid. This may have been true before the internet existed. And even though you can 'save' money from local vendors who send coupons we shouldn't be doing this via mailers. We need to send a message to local advertisers to use online advertisement methods.
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