Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Drowning in junk mail

There have been a lot of articles in the papers recently about junk mail. It used to be that we all wrote letters. These days there are not so many letters but we still want the option of having our Mothering Sunday cards delivered (trip out at lunchtime planned for Catherine and me to buy cards!) and this won't happen unless there is a nationwide service. It feels like unsolicited mail has increased perhaps because in a recession, companies need to get information on their products out to us. In the three years I have been in the house I have only once bought something from unsolicited mail so that is an awful lot of trees cut down to make instant recycling.

From my personal point of view the increase will just mean I put out the paper recycling bin twice as often. I have a canvas bag hanging on the back of my door which I sort junk into directly and I transfer this to my wheelie bin every other week. My issue with it is the amount of needless waste produced that my council then have to deal with, and the stupid use of resources to produce something that I regard as a nuisance.

There are some things that can be done and over the last three years I have cut down the unwanted material that comes through the door. You need to be aware that junk comes in different varieties.

The unsolicited mail that comes from the Royal Mail and can be stopped is unaddressed. If there is no address on the mail or it is addressed to 'the occupier' then you can contact Royal Mail and opt out. The details of how to do it with all the warnings about the information you might miss can be found at their website.

If you are getting junk addressed to you, either by name or to 'the occupier' followed by your address then Royal Mail is obliged to deliver it. It is, in fact, unlawful for them not to deliver it. In those circumstances you can contact the mailing preference service who will warn you about the great opportunities you might miss but give the option of, again, opting out of receiving their junk. On the same website you can find a telephone and an email opt out as well. This will cut down a lot of unsolicited mail although companies that you have bought goods from will continue to send their catalogues. This site will also allow you to stop advertising mail to former occupants of your house.

The third thing to do is to contact the people sending you unsolicited mailings directly. I have done this successfully with a number of companies. Usually I send a polite email asking the company not to send me any more catalogues. This works for companies I buy from too. I ask for an email catalogue rather than a paper one, not least because I am more likely to buy online from catalogues than send a hard copy of an order but also because I can delete anything that I am not interested in. This does not work for business addresses sadly or the ECUS paper recycling bin would be a lot more empty.

Yet another thing I do is to return mail for the people who lived here before me to the sender. I am never likely to buy a BMW. There is no point the garage sending out regular invitations to the former occupant. This has worked well.

The final thing is to put a notice on your door asking people not to deliver unsolicited mail. Apparently this works rather well. Stop Junk Mail will sell you a letterbox sticker or you can do your own. I am going to do my own so that I can say no to commercial leaflets and to free newspapers but yes to community information.

I suppose one more thing to think about. Maybe we should think about writing letters again. The immediacy of email is great but I've got two computer stacks full of no longer accessible emails and even if I eventually get them back, emails tend not to be things you treasure or even place a lot of importance on. You can see this in the weighting given to letters over emails in the 'real world'. I have sent many emails to my MP and my Prime Minister over the years but the only reply from the PM was when I composed a letter, printed it out, put it in an envelop, put a rather nice stamp on it and posted it. I've received very few replies to my emails to my MP.
I'm quite happy with the move to email catalogues and two sentence emails but I love to receive letters. Perhaps I should think about sending some.

1 comment:

  1. Great blog and very useful information.

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