Catalog Choice - You decide what gets in.

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.

All the climate change chatter in Copenhagen has us wondering, how green is America, anyway?  Can we make a meaningful commitment to truly address the daunting issue of global warming?  Can we be a world leader?  As Americans, we tend to pride ourselves on our eco-friendly lifestyles, but when it comes to the task of planet-saving, there are many countries that rank higher than the United States.  We found this interesting blog on Green Diva Mom that lists the world’s most eco-friendly countries, based on several different surveys.  Many European and South American countries score as some of the world’s greenest.

Take Recycled Rates for example.  The Unites States does a pretty good job at 31.5% of waste recycled, but there is plenty of room for improvement.  We are outranked by six countries:

• Switzerland, 52%
• Austria, 49.7%
• Germany, 48%
• Netherlands, 46%
• Norway, 40%
• Sweden, 34%
• United States, 31.5%

Take a look at the post to view some other interesting statistics and see how the United States compares to our fellow global citizens.

I was on the Earth911.com site today and found this cool widget.  Enter your zip code and learn about where you can recycle all sorts of household waste.

Dave Skoloda writes an interesting article in the Onalaska – Holmen Courier-Life on life with the catalog decades ago when ther were only a handful of “books” and today when there ar 17 billion mailed in the US.  Dave’s article highlights that we have come to a point in history when enough is enough.  Americans are inundated with unwanted mail and there needs to be a way to control it.

Nothing against the USPS – we all want Universal Mail service.  We all recognize that advertising mail helps subsidize the 6 day a week delivery service we enjoy.  But should that come at the enviromental and solid waste cost associated with the production and disposal of 11 billion pounds of advertising mail every year?

Dave, as well as many others, don’t think that the unabated delivery of unwanted mail is sustainable.  That is why he points his readers to Catalog Choice as a way to control unwanted catalog mailers.  Get the ones you want.  Stop mailing us the rest.

We are not living in the days of just a few catalogs, so thankfully we have an effective opt-out service. Dave writes:

One year all the catalogs — Montgomery Ward, Sears-Roebuck, and Savage — came on the same day at Ben Logan’s farm. The mailman’s Model T Ford was sagging on its springs, Logan wrote. And the mailman said, “Come and get some of these cussed things out of here before my springs give out.”

The cussed things are still loading up our mailboxes, so the relatively simple ways to opt out are welcome now as they would have been to Logan’s mailman nearly a century ago.

.

Most of us know that our behavior is being watched on the Web.   As we browse and shop on the Internet, a “cookie” travels with us, recording our preferences.  This technology is nothing new.  Cookies identify and track information about a user.  But cookies are getting more sophisticated, notes an article in today’s NewYorkTimes.com, and are now able to hold a lot more personal information about our Web behavior.  As the article aptly states, “On the old Internet, nobody knew you were a dog.  On the new targeted Internet, they now know what kind of dog you are, your favorite leash color, the last time you had fleas and the date you were neutered.”

Marketers love the profiling technology because it allows them to track a consumer’s interests and target advertising, giving them a way to pitch products to people most likely to buy.  Retailers like The Gap and Victoria’s Secret are use Web tracking info in just this way.

The comfort level of many consumer and privacy rights advocates, however, is being pushed too far.  In response, they are calling for Congress to force companies to make these Web shadowing practices more transparent to the consumer and give people a way to decline being tracked.  What are your thoughts?   Do you welcome more personalized advertising or are marketers getting too personal?