When you are a small scrappy company like Catalog Choice, you need to come up with creative ways to spread the word about your service. My teenage daughter encouraged me to go offline with information about Catalog Choice. We’ve designed the poster, below, that you can easily print and hang up anywhere.
Print copies of our poster and “post” them at work, school, gym, community center, or wherever you think others will see it. Thanks!
Click here to download the poster
Today the City of Seattle passed a non-binding resolution asking the State of Washington to set up a do not mail registry and directing the Seattle Public Utilities agency to evaluate the existing mail preference services as an option to provide an effective service to Seattle residents. This second part of the resolution is in direct response to feedback from the industry. As the largest independent voluntary mail preference solution, we welcome the opportunity to inform the City about what it takes to run an effective voluntary service.
You can view the Council’s discussion on the topic by viewing this video of the City Council meeting. Click Resolution 31169 from the right hand side index or fast forward to 46:50 of the video.
Like San Francisco, the City of Seattle will be voting on a resolution that requests the State to establish a Do Not Mail registry. The concepts is being openly discussed at this West Seattle Blog and was reported by the local news in this piece.
What do you think? We will follow the vote and let you know the outcome. To learn more you can find the draft resolution here and all sorts of articles on the topic here.
If your New Year’s resolution involves getting and staying more organized, you might need some spiffy new bins and baskets. Crate & Barrel, a participating merchant, offers many options including these eco-friendly totes. Knowing that your baskets are made from non-toxic & renewable materials makes filling them with your stuff even better.
$6.95 – $12.95
reg. $9.95 – $18.95
Eco-friendly totes in a sweater weave of twisted natural water hyacinth with a touch of rattan and a warm light brown lacquer finish. Handcrafted with sturdy metal frames, cutout handles and rounded corners. Two sizes nest when not in use.
Want to make a list of Crate & Barrel products and keep it on your desktop or personal homepage? The Crate & Barrel iCatalog holds their full product line in a compact, portable widget that lets you search for products, build lists and share your discoveries with friends.
Note: a portion of any purchase made through the iCatalog or the link in this blog post goes to support Catalog Choice.
For the New Year, San Diego is resolving to dramatically increase the amount of waste residents recycle, including advertising mail. An ordinance went into effect on January 1st and applies to virtually everyone and everything in the City. The law requires recycling of plastic, glass, paper, newspaper, metal containers and cardboard at private residences, commercial buildings, and at special events requiring a City permit. Those who ignore warnings can face fines of up to a thousand dollars. City officials hope that a recycling mandate will stretch the time San Diego can use the Miramar landfill, which is nearing capacity and slated for closure around 2017. To make recycling easy, some apartment complexes are conveniently locating recycling bins for residents, including placement next to mail boxes.
At the Colima Linda apartment complex, which got started on the program a couple of months ago, as much as 50 percent of its trash has been diverted to recycling; A good start, but not yet on target if the City is to meet and exceed its diversion goals. Currently, the State of California requires local governments to reduce waste disposed in landfills by 50 percent. In 2008, the City of San Diego achieved 64 percent diversion. City officials are striving to exceed that rate every year. This goal seems doable since about two-thirds of waste headed to the local landfill is recyclable. Go San Diego!
Better yet? Stop the waste at the source and take actions like reducing unwanted mail through Catalog Choice! We’ll soon announce our expanded service addressing other forms of advertising mail to help you and your towns and cities meet waste reduction goals.
A little junk mail comedy:
| Andrew Kennedy – Junk Mail | ||||
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Create an account at Catalog Choice – it is a much more effective way to control junk mail.
We resolve to put our mailbox on a diet.
Whenever you receive an unwanted catalog, rip off the back cover, recycle the rest and set the back cover next to your computer. Next time you go online or at least once a week, login to your Catalog Choice account and enter your opt-out request. It takes less then 30 seconds from start to finish.
If we all resolve to spend at least one minute setting our mail preferences every week, we will eliminate hundreds of pounds of unwanted mail. Be part of the solution.
When talking to the DMA and other advocates for direct mail, it is often argued that any impact caused by the harvesting of trees for advertising mail is offset by the fact new trees are planted and some of the paper comes from tree farms. I was always troubled by this argument but did not have a solid response, until now.
Bernd Heinrich, emeritus professor at the University of Vermont, wrote an excellent op-ed in the December 20th New York Times titled Clear-Cutting the Truth About Trees.
Heinrich notes:
Part of the problem is the public misunderstanding of how forests and carbon relate. Trees are often called a “carbon sink” — implying that they will sop up carbon from the atmosphere for all eternity. This is not true: the carbon they take up when they are alive is released after they die, whether from natural causes or by the hand of man. The only true solution to achieving global “carbon balance” is to leave the fossil carbon where it is — underground.
Beyond that, planting more trees is decidedly not the same thing as saving our forests. Instead, planting trees invariably means using them as a sustainable crop, which leads not only to a continuous cycle of carbon releases, but also to the increased destruction of our natural environment.
The solution is to reduce the volume of natural resource consumption. Catalog Choice is dedicated to providing a service that allows us, as a society, to reduce the volume of unwanted mail.
CleanScapes, a garbage-collection company in the Seattle area, is challenging five Seattle neighborhoods to reduce the amount of things stuffed into garbage, recycling and yard-waste bins. The winning neighborhood gets $50,000 for a project of its choosing.
According to this article in the Seattle Times:
“Rather than governments passing a law, we want to see what happens with a carrot,” said Chris Martin, president of CleanScapes, which took over the garbage collection in certain Seattle neighborhoods last March.
Ray Hoffman, head of Seattle Public Utilities (SPU), said that every week Seattle loads 5,100 tons of garbage onto a mile-long double-stacked train heading to a dump in Oregon 300 miles away. Recycling is taken to Allied Waste in SoDo; yard waste is trucked to Cedar Grove in Maple Valley and Marysville.
The most significant thing people can do to shrink their garbage footprint is to buy a mulching lawn mower so residents don’t fill up their yard-waste containers with grass clippings, Martin said. Another huge step would be canceling junk mail, which fills recycling bins, he said.
