At Catalog Choice, we are celebrating Earth Day by making it easier for consumers and merchants to reduce the amount of unwanted mail in their mailbox and go paperless.  We are celebrating the accomplishments of our one million members and 500 catalog partners who together, in just 18 months, have:

• removed over 85 million unwanted catalogs a year from the mail stream.
• Saved more than 192,000 trees and
• Prevented 82 million pounds of greenhouse gas emissions, the equivalent of removing about 7,500 cars off the road (Source: Environmental Defense paper calculator)

These are significant accomplishments for our community.  These are saving that don’t materialize if we take the easy way out and just recycle or throw away unwanted catalogs.  These savings require our members to record their mail preference for each catalog title and our merchant partners to integrate our preference file into their mailing processes.  While it seems easy, there are lots of moving parts that need to fit together to make the process work.  Today, we are celebrating the fact that we have used the power of the Internet and human ingenuity to removed over 85 million unwanted catalogs a year from the mail stream.

For Earth Day’s sake, let’s do more to develop processes that make our world more resource efficient.  In the world of direct marketing, let’s improve channels of communication between consumers and companies so that companies can get their marketing messages to the people who want them as efficiently as possible.

I was especially taken back by Mike’s answer to the following question:

Q. Do you think some Americans like to get unsolicited mail?

A. Absolutely. Americans have been buying from catalogs for over a century. The original unsolicited catalogs that people got, particularly in rural areas, were from Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward and J. C. Penney. They started the direct mail industry over a century ago.

Mike – in just one year over 1 million consumers have made over 14 million requests for unwanted catalogs to no longer be mailed to them here at Catalog Choice.  Mike has is own blog where you can let him know your opinion on this topic.  His blog is titled Open Mike.  Head on over to Mike’s blog to share your views on the topic of unsolicted mail.

The article was prompted by a suggestion from Napa resident Lisa Jaynes.  What caught my attention was that Lisa learned about Catalog Choice when she saw a flyer for our site in her garbage bill.

The flyer went out earlier this year to about 26,000 Napa city and south county garbage customers, according to the city’s Napa Materials Diversion Administrator Kevin Miller.

“The city and county of Napa are true believers in waste prevention, sometimes called ‘precycling.’ In the case of unwanted junk mail, recycling is good (and certainly better than sending it to be buried in a landfill),” Miller said, “but avoiding the junk mail in the first (place) is much better for the environment.” It’s the reduce part of “reduce, reuse, recycle.”

An important point that Jill makes in the article is “the site (catalogchoice.org) promises not to share your personal information beyond what is needed to take you off their list.”  That’s right – We only send your personal information to the merchant to request that they remove you from their mailing list.  As part of the transmission of your information, we require that they not rent, sell or use your name for any other purpose.  This remains a voluntary process and we continue to see more and more merchants updating their systems to accommodate consumers’ mail preference requests.

Currently, there are resources that folks can use to tell ad mailers to stop selling their names or to tell legislators to give citizens more control over their mailboxes, but there isn’t a tool to let folks say “this annoying catalog comes five times a month, make it stop!” or “I kinda like this catalog and want to keep receiving it.” Once CatalogChoice.org launches, citizens will have that very tool.

CatalogChoice.org will improve Americans’ quality of life but it will also help the planet. In 2005, 5.8 million tons of catalogs and other direct mailings ended up in the U.S. municipal solid waste stream – enough to fill over 450,000 garbage trucks. Parked bumper to bumper these garbage trucks would extend from Atlanta to Albuquerque. Less than 36% of this ad mail was recycled.

And to make matters worse, citizens and local governments spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year to collect and dispose of all the bulk mail that doesn’t get recycled. Fortunately, thanks to CatalogChoice.org, Americans will have more power to decide what mail they want to receive – and we’ll all reap the benefits of that.