Eco-Chick · The modern girl's guide to living green & fabulous.

Five Surefire Ways to Get Rid of Junk Mail

If you’re like me, you love getting mail. The holiday cards, the thank you notes, etc. There is little more exciting than the sound of opening an envelope and reading a real piece of mail. But what I hate is the junk mail. Specifically the catalogs that clog my mailbox and pile up day after day.

Turns out that more than 19 billion catalogs are mailed to households in the United States every year. That’s 63 catalogs for each man, woman and child in the US. Well, I wanted to put an end to this flood of useless mail.  I knew my family was getting a ton of these unwanted, unrequested catalogs from companies like LL Bean, Land’s End, Victoria’s Secret, Restoration Hardware and a whole host of other companies well (frankly, for me, it was eighty-two companies). Eighty-two, that is how many different companies have sent me a mail-order catalogs in the past 2 months.  That is more than one catalog a day not including repeat catalogs! That’s a lot of junk mail.

How do I know it is eighty-two?  About two months ago I began using Catalog Choice, a free service that contacts mail-order companies for you to remove your name from their mailing lists.  I knew I received a lot of catalogs but I had no idea that is was SOOO many.

Using the Environmental Defense Fund paper calculator, Catalog Choice calculated the impact of all these catalogs on our environment. More than 53 million trees are need make 3.6 million tons of paper and 38 trillion BTUs of energy are need to produce the paper (enough to power 1.2 million households per year.) This process emits 5.2 million tons of carbon dioxide equal to annual emissions of 2 million cars — significantly contributing to global warming.

More that 53 billion gallons of wastewater is discharged to create the catalog paper — enough to fill 81,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.  This doesn’t even take into account the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted by the US Post Office from delivering these useless pieces of paper.

Since its launch last year, almost one million people have joined Catalog Choice and already opted out of 13,117,365 catalogs.  More than 1,000 companies have joined in to help people opt out of getting their catalogs, but there are a few that have decided not to participate.  Out of the 82 companies on my list just Garnet Hill, the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Store, Nordstroms, and Title Nine are not participating.  To date, 22 companies on my list have confirmed the opt out and Catalog Choice is working on the rest.

Catalog Choice is not the only service out there. For a fee, GreenDimes and 41pounds.org will get rid of unwanted junk mail and catalogs. OptOutPrescreen.com will stop unwanted credit or insurance offers. Even the Direct Marketing Association offers ways to remove your name and address for mailing list.

It is so easy you have to try.  All you have to do is input them, and Catalog Choice does the rest.

Let me know how many catalogs you get rid of!

To read more of my posts check out my blog Green Luvin’ and join me on Facebook.

Greener Printer: eco-friendly printing

As a graphic designer (print based), I’m aware of the huge impact commercial printing has on the environment. Luckily there are great eco-friendly printers out there like Greener Printer in Berkeley, CA who can help reduce the impact of printed materials.

The 4 areas Greener Printer focuses on are: 1. Water Conservation, 2. Solid Waste Reduction and Recyling, 3. Energy Conservation and 4. Pollution Prevention. In addition, Greener Printer prints on treeless and recycled content papers, exclusively prints with low VOC soy and other vegetable-based inks, uses energy efficient equipment, and offsets 100% of their energy usage with windpower. They are also a certified Green Business.

To give an idea of what they offer, Greener Printers prints business cards, calendars, brochures, postcards, catalogs, posters and many other print communication items. For non-local clients, printing is super easy— just upload files to their site and get the orders shipped (all jobs are shipped “climate cool“).

In short, if you have materials printed for yourself, your organization or your business, make sure to consider printing with environmentally responsible printers. At this point, the costs for eco-friendly printing are reasonable, the finished products are beautiful and the reduced footprint is considerable. Check here and here for info and tips on printing green.

Victoria's Dirty Secret

I was reading Business Week online and noticed this interesting piece on Victoria’s Secret. Limited Brands, the parent company of VS, has been publically indicted for its blatant use of virgin fiber in their catalog production that reaches quantities as large as 395 million produced anually. This paper ends up in the garbage, or if we’re lucky, in the recycling bin.

The destruction of the forests of the Southern U.S., where nearly 6 million acres are logged annually, and the continuing decimation of the endangered Canadian Boreal Forest has generated concern internationally. The organization largely to blame for bringing this flagrant deforestation to the fore is Forest Ethics, a group who seek to hold corporations accountable for the destruction of, yep, you guessed it, our forests! 225 protests took place accross the U.S. on April 11th of this year, putting pressure on the company to terminate its contract with International Paper, who have been criticized for destroying endangered woodlands. Since the campaign began, VS has begun using 80% recycled content for their clearance catalogs but their current contract is still largely using pulp derived from endangered species.

Think Spring!

The time to plant tulip, iris, and hyacinth bulbs is past in much of the country, but spring planting is right around the corner. Gladiolas, tuberoses, and dalias will be ready to add to your garden, and virtually thumbing through garden catalogs online is a great way to beat the winter blues.

This past fall I ordered from Old House Gardens, the well-known, well-loved and very favorably reviewed mail order bulb company. The reason they merit mention here is because they specialize in antique, heirloom and endangered bulbs. The variety of their flowering bulbs is amazing, and they give you a run down of where and when the bulb was originally planted. Some of their bulbs are from lines that started as early as the 1200′s, though the most antique selections tend have the most limited availability.

If you want a unique garden, as well as one that preserves old lines of flowers, heirloom bulbs are the way to go. And to learn more about human beings’ connection with flowers, read the “Tulip” chapter of Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire for enlightenment.