5 Tips To Reducing Junk Mail
Let’s face it. Your business probably gets some form of junk mail every day. Vendors offering non-related products, banks offering loans or credit cards, and catalogs pouring in non-stop. Junk mail not only costs dearly in trees cut, but also in money wasted for no particular reason. And these days, it’s not just in the mail; junk mail is now also moved around electronically, wasting a lot of server bandwidth that requires energy to run.
Reducing unwanted benefit can have several benefits to your business. First, of course, you’ll be reducing your business’ footprint as paper use and delivery-related carbon emissions will be cut. Your employees will also save a great amount of time checking junk mail, which can instead be used to increase productivity and therefore earnings, in addition to reduce your waste bill. All of these things can help towards reducing the more than 100 million trees cut down each year, 4.5 billion gallons of water used, and billions of dollars wasted to create 4.5 million tons of junk mail in the U.S.
Here are five tips to reducing junk mail:
1. Sign up to a junk mail reduction service. There are a few services online that work for you to reduce your junk mail. They provide easy steps for you to opt out of junk mail, phonebooks, and even telemarketing. Some will even go as far as to do it all for you for a fee. Check out the EcoLogical Mail Coalition (free), EcoCycle (free), and 41Pounds (not free).
2. Omit your address online. Try to online include names, phone numbers, and e-mails on business cards and websites, but not your office address. When signing up for services, deals, and promotions, don’t include your address. If you need to include your address, put in a random one or just put an X.
3. Opt Out of Catalogs. There is a free service called Catalog Choice that allows you to opt-out of many catalogs listed online. They also help you indicate how junk catalogs can reach you, making it almost impossible for them to send you anything. Check it out to learn more.
4. Opt Out of Phonebooks. Similar to the National No-Call Registry, there is a service called YellowPagesGoesGreen that allows you to opt out of local Yellow and White pages so you don’t receive unnecessary phonebooks.
5. Unsubscribe from Junk E-mail. You may have a spam filter in use to get rid of junk e-mail, but all this does is put junk e-mail in a different place. Spam filters don’t reduce server usage, and therefore don’t do anything about reducing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions from servers. To help stop even junk e-mail, periodically check your spam folder and unsubscribe from unwanted e-mails.
