Stopping Junk Mail

It always amazes me when I come home from travelling how much mail I have waiting for me. What's even more amazing is how little of it is important. Go away for 6 weeks like I did last summer and you can really see it, bags of recycling and a small pile of important things (I pay all my bills online now and receive very few in the mail).

I decided to do something about this 2008, here's what I've learned so far:

Over 100 million trees are cut down each year to make the paper for junk mail. The average American receives 41 pounds of junk mail per year, spends 70 hours dealing with it, and 44% of it is never opened.

Took me less then 30 minutes to follow the recommendations here, now I just need to drop the letters in the mail: http://www.stopjunkmail.org/

And, here's an easy way to opt out of unwanted catalogs:

http://www.catalogchoice.org/

Each year 19 billion catalogs are sent to American consumers!!

• Number of trees used – 53 million trees
• Pounds of paper used – 3.6 million tons of paper
• Energy used to produce this volume of paper – 38 trillion BTUs, enough to power 1.2 million homes per year
• Contribution to global warming – 5.2 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions, equal to the annual emissions of two million cars
• Waste water discharges from this volume of paper – 53 billion gallons of water, enough to fill 81,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools