the junk mail war is on...

I've been growing quite tired of receiving 3-4 catalogs, 3 credit card offers, and coupon circulars in the mail nearly every day. That is an amazing amount of wasted paper because they automatically go in the trash! I finally decided the other day that I'm done with it all and I declared war!

What I've started doing is immediately calling the 1-800 number on the back of every catalog and removing our names from their list. I also called the 1-800 number on the back of the credit card offers and opted out of receiving any pre-screened offers in the mail. One of the things that bugs me the most is the coupons and I had a hard time finding the source, so I did some investigating and found one company. Check out Valassis' website and put your name on their do-not-mail list. It still takes a few weeks for it to happen, but at least you can cut down on wasted paper and wasted time throwing that junk away.

I also just found a site called Pro Quo that actually takes your name off of a lot of lists. It also gives you forms and numbers to call to get off of lists they don't have access to. It looks pretty good, but I haven't done anything with it yet. They promise that you'll be down to almost no junk mail in 3 months! Sounds pretty good to me!

I know it might seem like a winless battle, but if everyone would spend a few minutes each day unsubscribing from all the junk mail they get in their boxes that day, we might just save quite a bit of paper and energy. Plus you might just find that you're less tempted to buy all the junk advertised!

hooray for Whole Foods!

Whole Foods grocery chain just announced that it is bagging the use of plastic bags in its stores. At the risk of sounding like a tree-hugger, I would like to applaud that decision! Americans use about 100 million bags each year, and as you know from experience, their life span is usually pretty short. Sure, sometimes we reuse them to line the bathroom trashcan or to throw a poopy diaper in. But most of the time, you get home from the store 10 minutes after your purchase and toss them in the trash. These bags litter the roads, city streets, rivers, and they're filling up the landfills and just hanging around for thousands of years.

Sarah and I bought canvas shopping bags at Trader Joe's a year ago in LA. It took us awhile to get in the habit of actually bringing the bags into the store, but now it is routine. We always used paper in the past, but even paper is not the best because it requires virgin timber to produce. At any rate, I figure that we've saved well over 400 paper bags in the past year alone using our canvas bags. Even if you dismiss my hippiness, you have to agree that if grocery stores didn't have to supply bags for their shoppers, it might eventually save us some money because they could cut their costs.