I can hardly believe it! Clearly, I was inundated with unsolicited catalogs and junk mail, like most of us, but I was stunned when my catalog tally crept to over one hundred. As of today, using CatalogChoice.org, I have unsubscribed to 128 catalogs. A few continue to trickle in, but they do tell you it can take several months before a catalog will stop completely.


I’m calling March “Green Box” month at my house. Every day during the month of March, I am going to make a concerted effort to clean up the last bit of unsolicited junk mail coming to my mailbox by using ProQuo.com‘s online service. Recently, they have added a catalog decline feature. Another way I attempt to stop junk mail is to simply send mailings back to the sender in their own postage paid envelop, writing across one of the pages “Remove me from your mailing list”. Care to join me?

If you need a little more motivation to stop the deluge of catalogs and junk mail coming to your home or business, consider what your inadvertent contribution is to your local paper waste stream. I will use Oregon, where I live, as an example. These recycling and disposal are from the state of Oregon in 2002: Total recyclable paper generated: 990,223 tons, cardboard and brown bags generated: 452,279 tons, newspaper and magazines generated: 288,536 tons, Hi-grade paper generated: 86,920 tons, Low-grade recyclable paper generated: 162,089 tons, non-recyclable paper combined, generated: 129,825 tons. This totals 1,120,048 tons of paper products generated of which 440,077 tons of paper were disposed of, and 679,971 tons of paper were recovered (60.7%). Lane County has a goal of recycling 54% of our overall waste stream by 2009.

In order to reduce the amount of paper waste heading for recycling and landfills, we have to rethink and reduce our consumption of paper products at home and at the office. It takes the cooperation of all of us, as consumers, to use our buying power and choices politically, to send messages to manufacturers and businesses that we are conscientious about the choices, green choices, we are making. Declining unsolicited catalogs, reducing the number of magazines we subscribe to, and bringing a halt to junk mail solicitation are giant steps forward, as we collectively send a message to sellers of products and services that we don’t want more trees cut down, nor our natural resources exhausted to fill our mailboxes with their advertising and promotional materials.

Here are a few more things we can do to reduce the paper waste stream in our area:

(1) Buy recycled paper for home and office use.

(2) Make two-sided copies when printing.

(3) When we are finished reading magazines, recycle them at a local transfer station, give them to our library or non-profits like St. Vincent de Paul and the Assistance League; drop them by our doctors’ offices for patients to peruse, or offer them to schools for current event reporting and craft projects.

(4) Use cloth shopping bags instead of paper or plastic. Many retailers and grocers now want to be part of the solution by selling cloth bags for a nominal fee.