If your postman is looking tired and you’re fed up with the mountains of catalogues falling through your door every day, you probably won’t be too surprised to know that almost 5.4 million items of direct mail are sent out each year in the UK*. While some of the catalogues that we receive are useful, a lot of direct mail is still ending up in landfill rather than being recycled, and much of it is not even read at all. So, if you are getting too much unwanted junk mail then you’ll be pleased to know that there’s something very effective you can do to get it to stop.
In the UK, the MPS or Mail Preference Service allows you to add your name to its register for free and this will effectively stop about 95% of unwanted junk mail from coming through your door. You also have the option of stopping the junk mail being sent to a previous resident of your property, which can be very handy if, like me, you still receive a previous owners junk mail years after moving in.
Take care when you do sign up to receive a catalogue that you tick the little box (or mention to them if you sign up by phone) saying that you don’t want to receive mailings from “carefully selected third parties”, or your name will end up on the list of customers that is rented out to other companies that aren’t always all as carefully selected as you might like.
And a final word of advice is to print yourself a page of simple labels with the words “Please remove me from your mailing list” on them to slap onto unwanted catalogues before you pop them back into the nearest postbox. Once you’ve asked to be removed from a mailing list, the company mailing you has an obligation to respect your wishes and stop mailing you.
This method has worked very well for me, and apart from the odd un-addressed item I get now, we are pretty much a junk mail free zone. While you’re on the MPS website signing up to the register, have a look at the Telephone Preference Service to stop those pesky sales calls.
*Defra
If you have any tips of reducing unwanted direct mail or want to tell us how to recycle junk mail in a creative way, leave a comment or discuss this post on the EcoStreet forum.
Comments:
If the postman looks tired he/she should be reprimanded. The reality is that if there were no junk mail the price of posting a regular second class letter would be £1.45. The reason is that the only part of Royal Mail that makes money is bulk mail - so if the postman is getting fed up he/she is getting fed up with the thing that pays the salary. Of course we can cut junk mail but the main effect will be to throw the postal service into disarray, put up mail prices (not much good for the elderly who haven’t gone over to email) and have around 145,000 people at the very least unemployed.
Of course there is an alternative - which you will have seen in the serious science magazines of late. If we simply put our resources into paying countries with rainforests not to allow the rainforests to be cut down, the whole global warming problem would be fixed in a single go. It would cost - but it would save the planet.
Tony Attwood
Leave a reply or comment:
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed