• In 2008 we generated about 250 million tons of trash.  That translates to about 4.5 pounds of trash a day for every American.
• We throw away about 19% more stuff than we did in 1980 and a whopping 44% more than we did in 1960. Since 1990 our waste generation has stayed about the same.
• Organic materials are the largest component of municipal solid waste. Paper and paperboard account for 31% and yard trimmings and food scraps account for 26%.
• Over the decades our waste generation has grown, but our recycling rate has also increased from less than 10% in 1980 to more than 33% in 2008.
• Recycling and composting 83 million tons of waste in 2008 reduced CO2 emissions equivalent to keeping 33 million passenger vehicles off the road.
• About 8,660 curbside recycling programs exist in the U.S., down from 8,875 in 2002.
• The amount of trash we send to landfills has declined from 89% in 1980 to 54% in 2008.
• We recover only about one-third of our nondurable goods. Those are the things that generally last less than three years.  We do a pretty good job recycling newspapers (88% recycled), cardboard (77%) and high-grade office papers (71%).
• Only 40% of magazines and unwanted advertising mail are recycled – the rest still goes to the landfill.
• 80% of phone books are sent to the landfill.

Our strategy for waste prevention is to stop the waste at the source.  We love recycling, but precycling is even better.  So encourage your friends, neighbors and co-workers to do their part to reduce the generation of waste in the first place.  Step 1 – sign up for Catalog Choice and opt-out of unwanted mail and phonebooks.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Using the trash can just got intriguing:

Got any ideas how to make reducing unwanted mail more fun, let us know by posting a comment.

Green America’s vision for the next 25 years is for us to join together to rapidly deploy their 25 strategies across the economy, so that the marketplace and our society completes the shift to green by the middle of the century.

You can read the entire article here, starting on page 8.  You will find Catalog Choice in item 17 – Be WoodWise.

So what is necessary to give consumers the ability to opt-in to getting the white pages?  Like many things, some laws have to be changed.  There is something that you can do about it.  Head over to Banthephonebook.org and sign their petition.

Thanks to NPR for running a short segment on this.

I can’t remember the last time I used the white pages to look up a phone number.  Can you?