Do you come home everyday to find stacks of junk mail and unwanted catalogs in your mailbox? In our house the junk mail ends up in the recycle bin before coming through the door. What a waste of marketing dollars!
Catalog Choice is a free service which allows you to control the catalogs you receive in the mail. Just a simple click; you choose the company and Catalog Choice sends them an opt-out request. It can take up to 12 weeks for the catalogs to stop coming and you can check on the status of each request by logging into your account.
Photo used under Creative Commons from Vards Uzvards
Catalog Choice has a great mission-reducing the number of unwanted, repeat and unsolicited catalogs sent to people like us who end up just chucking them into the recycle bin. It is also a direct benefit to the thousands of companies who spend unnecessary marketing dollars sending unwanted catalogs to consumers.
The company is scheduled to launch a new look with new features at the end of September 2010. Here are a few of the changes:
- Every piece of unwanted mail or phone book that stops coming translates to reduced demand for natural resources. Working with the Environmental Defense Fund’s Paper Calculator, the collective benefits of the Catalog Choice community will be measured along with your individual contribution.
- There will now be records of the companies you have asked to stop sending. Your personal Activity Statement will also show the company’s response.
- There will be a dispute process if a company is not respecting your request to stop sending catalogs.
Many more changes are coming to Catalog Choice. For more info click HERE.
Maybe the American Girl Doll catalog will finally stop coming to my boy filled house. Or the toddler geared companies will stop wasting their money sending me catalogs on a regular basis-no toddlers here anymore.
So the next time an unwanted catalog shows up in your mail box click on Catalog Choice. What a simple way to reduce waste and save natural resources.
Have you used Catalog Choice or any other company to stop unwanted junk mail?
This is a great piece and near and dear to my heart!
We get virtually no junk mail and only one or two catalogs by choice. (not even that bright blue Val-Pak.)
I’m on top of telling every catalog company, credit card, magazines, non-profits, professional organization, banks, credit bureaus, etc. to not sell our name to other mailing list and to opt of of theirs.
The downside is that I do very little on-line donating. Fundraising organizations like American Heart, Cancer Assoc. etc, don’t have obvious opt-out options for on-line fundraising when someone is running a 10k to raise money. Although good causes, these non-profits sell your name between them, and continue the cycle of wasting natural resources!
Thanks for your comment Joan. Do you contact each company directly as the mail comes in? I am sure that it has taken you a long time to get to this place of no junk mail. That is very impressive. As for on-line donating, I am guessing most people have their set charities they support annually. I am not sure how much money the mail in campaigns generate. There is a lot of waste among all the companies-imagine what how those dollars could actually be working for them!
Thanks so much for writing on this topic, Lori. I’ve had a hard time ending catalog mailings from some places like Gaiam Living. I wonder if this will work with the local mailings I receive address to me or other resident, the postal patron ones. I would love to get off that list.
You are so welcome Sandra! Sometimes it takes a while for the stop request to kick in. I’ve had to ask more than once for several publications. It seems the junk mail is never ending-what a waste of resources!