The holidays are coming, and that means more unsolicited catalogs and direct mail offers crammed into your mailbox than ever. While unsolicited mail is annoying at any time of year, the flood of junk mail usually hits hardest in November and December, all in the hopes that you’ll make holiday purchases from the piles of possible vendors that the postman delivers to you. I remember watching my parents sort through a stack of catalogs that was two, sometimes three feet tall each winter. And that was just the catalogs they chose to browse through; most of the offers that came in the mail went straight into the trash.

Privacy Council wants you to know just how much waste is due to junk mail and catalogs. In a given year, it’s estimated that 19 billion catalogs are mailed to consumers. Of those, 5.6 million tons of catalogs and direct mail ads are put into landfills. That’s so much waste that it’s hard to comprehend! According to Worldwatch Institute (as quoted at Carbonrally.com), the United States has 5 percent of the world’s population, but consumes 30 percent of the world’s paper. Can we recycle it? Sure, but according to the Center for a New American Dream, only 22 percent of junk mail is recycled today. Besides, that doesn’t even begin to address the energy and trees used in making all the junk mail in the first place, then recycling it later. It’s a blow to the environment on several fronts, but you can do something about it.

First, sign up for Privacy Council’s environmentally-friendly service and get yourself removed from the major catalog mailing lists. This will drastically cut the amount of junk mail you receive, so you’ll know you’re doing your part to reduce the paper waste. How much waste can you personally help to prevent? Estimates indicate that, on average, consumers receive 110 catalogs per household per year, so over ten years, you could help to keep more than a thousand catalogs from ending up in a landfill. That makes a real difference.

Also, make sure that you aren’t granting companies the right to sell your contact information to mailing lists when you sign up for a new product or service (check the fine print and opt-out whenever possible). Finally, if you still want to receive a few specific catalogs during the holidays, contact those companies directly and ask them to send you their catalogs, perhaps at a lesser pace (instead of four or five catalogs per company during the holiday season, for example, the company could send you just one or two catalogs). 

‘Tis the season to be festive, but don’t forget about the environment!   

Sources for this article: Center for a New American Dream, Carbonrally, The Virginia Gazette