Junk those Catalogs!
by Reida Kimmel

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According to the December issue of the Environmental Defense Fund's newsletter, in 1998 five dozen separate catalogs were produced for every single person in the United States. These seventeen billion catalogs consumed three and a third million tons of paper. To produce those tons of paper, countless pounds of toxic inks, bleach and BTUs of precious energy were wasted. Few companies use any recycled materials in their catalogs. If your household is anything like mine, the overwhelming mass of your trash, especially at holiday season, is waste paper, specifically, unwanted, unsolicited catalogs. This year one of the few mail order companies I do shop from sold my name and my son's, and catalogs arrived by the pound nearly every day in November and December. It was easy to figure out who had done it, and they got a piece of my mind. I also patiently telephoned each mailorder firm asking to be removed from their mailing list, using the 800 number of course. In order to insure that we did not continue to receive other unwanted mail, I wrote to the following address asking that we be removed from national advertising lists.

Mail Preference Service
c/o Direct Marketing Association
P.O. Box 9008
Farmingdale, NY 11735-9008

To greatly reduce the frequency of annoying phone solicitations, you can write to
Telephone Preference Service
c/o Direct Marketing Association
P.O. Box 9014
Farmingdale, NY 1175-9014

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