Passionate Homemaking

Super­mar­ket flyers, adver­tise­ments addressed to “current resident”, cat­a­logs you never asked for! It has started dri­ving me up the wall!

In an effort to cut back on the waste in our family, we began recy­cling our junk mail! I would never have thought that you could save so much space in your kitchen garbage bag by recy­cling all this paper! I cut back from once a week, to once every two weeks in dump­ing the kitchen garbage.

But at the same time, we are still often just bring­ing in the mail and dis­pos­ing of it imme­di­ately in the recy­cling bins. The ques­tion begs to be asked…is this the best way to be good stew­ards of the earth that the Lord has entrusted to our care? How can we cut this stream of junk mail at the source?

Here are a few options:

1. Reg­is­ter for the Direct Mar­ket­ing Association’s Mail Pref­er­ence Ser­vice. It costs $1 (only if you mail in, online is free with the pro­vi­sion of a CC to con­firm iden­tity, but they do not charge it), and it will stop com­mer­i­cal mail from com­pa­nies that you don’t already do busi­ness with.

2. Email your full name and cur­rent address to the Abacus Cat­a­log Alliance (optout@abascus-direct.com), which will take you off the list of its members.

3. Sign up for OptOut­Pre­screen, which will stop pre­screened credit-​card offers.

4. Sign the Do Not Mail Reg­istry, a peti­tion to stop junk mail.

4. Lastly, you will still have strag­glers to which you will have to give a ring! Hang onto these through­out the week and make a once a week call to the company’s toll-​free number. It works! We have been receiv­ing unnec­es­sary gift receipts for our monthly giving to dif­fer­ent orga­ni­za­tions. I would rather these costs of print­ing be cut back and used for more effec­tive use. So I called them and just asked for a annual state­ment for tax pur­poses. They were more than happy to change this for me.

It may take a few months to notice a dif­fer­ence, but I want to make an effort to cut back on all this junk!