What a waste!

I’ve written about this before but I think it bears repeating because things have changed somewhat. I’m talking about junk mail. I would suggest that it is worth reviewing you junk load at least once a year. Why? I’ll come back to that.

First, I’ll redefine what I think junk mail is. It is mail that arrives unasked for that gets stripped of its plastic wrapper and goes straight into the recycling bin. The wrapper goes into general waste. Very, very, very occasionally something turns up that turns out to be useful but generally, not.

So, what’s the problem? It’s two seconds work to strip and bin.

The problem, of course, is that you are then paying to have that waste disposed of. Think of it as legalised flytipping. You might think that it doesn’t cost so much but in an office of twenty you will often find that a good part of the recycling bin is full of unwanted adverts, unread magazines and the stuff that comes tucked inside them. And from an environmental point of view, tree have died, been processed into paper, printed and then gone straight into the bin. Much of the stuff isn’t even good for composting due to the gloss and colour.

The other thing is, important stuff can get lost in among the junk. I found my voter registration form this morning whilst I was picking up piles of junk mail to photograph. (I’m working from home and therefore don’t have access to the recycling bins dotted around the office.)

In fact the stuff in the photograph bears looking at. Some of it is addressed to the former occupant of my house – four years gone. When I remember I send these ads back with ‘No longer at this address’ scrawled across them. I have been doing this for four years. I’m still getting stuff. This is complete junk and a total waste for the sender too.

Then there are take away menus. This is inevitable. I live in a student area. Students live on takeaways. Leafletting my street every other month is cost effective because the student have probably lost the menus in that time. My method with these is to immediately throw away anything not in ten minutes walking distance. I used to keep the local ones. Now I don’t. I throw away all the local ones too and look the menu up online. If they don’t have a website they don’t get any business from me. (It must be said that the Bilash (red (meat) and green (vegetarian) menus) is an excellent take away but I do resent the number of leaflets I get from them.)

There is the Natural Collection catalogue. I’ve bought stuff from them, on and off, for years. I thought I asked them to stop sending me catalogues last year when I did a concerted campaign to stop my junk but I can’t find my email so maybe not. An amail has gone today. The send me regular alerts on at least two of the email addresses anyway. I don’t need the paper copy.

And then there is Christian Aid. This was the charity I donated my sponsor money to when I lived on £1 a day earlier this year. Now they email me regularly and send me lots of paper. I get the emails. I don’t need the paper. I hadn’t even opened them. They were just sitting on the junk pile. Now I’ve taken them apart, put the freepost envelopes for reuse and binned the rest. I know that any charity wants more supporters and more money from their current supporters but I would actually prefer them to spend the money I donate on helping people in need, not printing and posting stuff to me. I get the emails! In the past I made a one-off donation to a charity that I suspect spent all my money on sending me letters asking for more cash. They didn’t get any more cash. An email has gone out to Christian Aid.

The point is, in a year a business will have contact with a great number of new organisations. A good number of those will take the opportunity to send their marketing to you in paper form. Those need to be culled. Also, we asked a number of membership organisations to only send one magazine. We are a small office. We can share. At one point I think we were getting six copies of The Environmentalist. The problem here, I guess, is perhaps adverisers need a certain number of paper copies to go out before they are willing to buy space. Whatever. You are probably going to have to remind some organisations to which you subscribe that you really meant, ‘Only one please.’

Times are difficult and the one thing that doesn’t go down in a recession is the marketing budget but that doesn’t mean that any organisation wants to pay for getting rid of junk paper. So, to add to the improvement log:

• Rather than just bin the rubbish, spend a day asking people not to send paper marketing – you can offer your email address as an alternative
• Revisit the organisations that are sending you magazines. Ask them to keep it to one for the whole organisation or none at all and read it on line.
• Talk to the people who send you catalogues. In some cases the paper catalogue is useful but often it is much easier to search and buy on line. Again, cut the number of catalogues received from each supplier to one or none at all.
• Make sure that the residual paper is recycled.