GreenTech Media has a good post on how email spam wastes more than just your time — it wastes electricity! Oh, and not just a little, according to the report: enough to power 2.4 Million homes — that’s about 2% of the households in the US. Yikes.
Sounds like a job for the EPA, to me. (more…)
Pure Waste!
But every year, we get the “yellow pages” dropped on our doorstep. Actually we get a bunch of them. We never use them, so they make a direct line to our recycling bin.
One service that I didn’t know about, until I read my IdealBite email today, is a site called YellowPagesGoesGreen.Org, and which will send an opt-out request to yellow pages companies producing these books, for free. You can stop yellow pages and white pages here.
Kudos to YellowPagesGosGreen.Org (and for GreenDimes and other services like Catalog Choice)!
The facts about these books, below, are not unexpected, I guess. But holy cow, it’s just such an incredible waste! (more…)
A picture is worth a thousand words. And I’ll just add one more: by doing almost everything listed here we have reduced our energy consumption by at least 1/3 and we think by 1/2.
Click the picture to see the details. Simple, simple, simple.
A service called SquidNotes let’s you create a signed birthday/going away/having a baby card, the kind we all cringe when we see being passed around a company. Ah, the Internet, saving the world, one uncomfortable moment at a time.
But Ed Begley and TerraPass have started a cool card … to Earth, for Earth Day, on which we can all write a little something we mean to do. Check it out!
I got a message from GreenDimes today indicating that the Direct Marketing Association is fighting back against attempts to opt out of junk mail lists. This shows that their work and that of others is making a difference, and also shows how regressive DMA is.
Sign the GreenDimes petition to create a national Do Not Mail Registry! You don’t have to be a member.
And then check out GreenDimes and sign up!
(more…)
I heard about a new service today called Catalog Choice; it sounds like they do a similar thing as GreenDimes, which is another service to stop junk mail and catalogs. It’s an interesting problem, in a way: two companies doing about the same thing, one for a small fee, the other for free. Which one is better? (more…)
We joined GreenDimes probably six months ago, and our mailbox is a much happier place. Use GreenDimes to stop junk mail and unwanted catalogs — they’ll remove your name from catalog mailing lists. Mostly, it’s just automatic, since they know all the places to contact to effectively remove your name from lists. Still, some catalogs would come, and you could add them to a list. When we joined, the process for adding catalogs was pretty painful and time consuming. I wrote a while back that the jury was still out for me on the efficacy of the service, but now I’m convinced its a good thing.
One great addition: they have added a much simpler way of adding new catalogs to stop: just type in the name of the company — in most cases, they already have a listing (even for some local companies, which I was pleasantly surprised by). In any case, you can now just type in the name and hit “Add” — I guess they look up companies they don’t already have in their database based on what you type in, and once added, they’ll show up in the list for other users. Smart.
I like GreenDimes because it’s more than stopping junk mail, they also plant trees. I think the cost has been well worth it for our formerly catalog laden household.
We have had some pretty surprising successes in our efforts to reduce energy consumption. But there are a number of things we have tried that don’t work as well as we want. (more…)
About a year ago, I wrote about my efforts to stop junk mail. It took two rounds of calling, emailing and then a couple of months before the volume slowed. It did slow and most of the places we requested list removal for honored the request. But it was a lot of work, and it was far from complete. Every time we order something from a new company, we get on a new list (or lists). And now as the Christmas season is upon us, some are back. It seems unstoppable. But the folks at IdealBite found a great service that I have signed up to stop junk mail with GreenDimes: for a dime a day, not only will they remove your name from junk mail lists, but also plant a new tree each month. (more…)
In January, after the onslaught of Christmas catalogs, I did a massive round of catalog stopping — here’s a progress report. (more…)
