My wife handed me a newspaper article saying how to opt out from direct marketing lists, and how to opt out from preapproved credit offers. These have single-handedly created a market for personal shredders, and I’m tired of filling up landfills. When I went to the web site of the Direct Marketing Association*, they lead you through several screens trying to obfuscate the possibility of opting out, all along trying to convince you of how valuable their landfill overflow service is. When you finally fill in your information, there are three options:
Of course once you make the obvious selection, there is one more screen to try to convince you not to do it – warning you of all sorts of consequences from not having to carry all that paper to the landfill.
Whenever I pick up the mail, I usually tear up the junk mail, stuff it back into the business reply mail envelope, and mail it back to them so they can dispose of it. It isn’t a very green thing to do, but at least it puts the burden of disposing of this crap on the communities that support direct mail marketing.
I’ve always been amused by the fact that www.dma.org is not the domain for the direct marketing association as you might expect. Turns out the Dayton Microcomputer Association, which must get a shitload of pageviews from their choice of domain. It goes to show you that the DMA was slow to recognize the value of the Internet, confirming their general disregard for the world around them.
1 response so far ↓
1 almadenmike // Mar 27, 2008 at 9:48 am
Kevin — I use the same “mail-back” tactic for the dozens of credit-card applications we get in the mail every week. The companies have to pay (by weight) for their business reply mail, so I hope it helps the Postal Service revenue, in addition to giving some incentive to those mass-mailers to stop sending applications to folks they darn well know already have one (or more!) of their credit cards.
Also, for all your shredded paper, I recommend worm composting. We’ve had one of the three-level composters in our garage for years now. We started because we had drainpipe clogging issues with stuff that went down the garbage disposer — we have a very shallow slope to our drain pipe under the house, it turns out. Since we started giving all of our veggie waste to the worms, we’ve not had any pipe-sludge problems … and of course we get a regular supply of nutrient-rich solid (and liquid) garden fertilizer, too.
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