Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Return to Sender - Fight Back Against Junk Mail

I created a new Facebook cause to fight back against junk mail.

http://apps.facebook.com/causes/191942?recruiter_id=39818166

Here's the details:
  1. For companies, the environment is (almost) always secondary to profit.
  2. The best way to help the environemnt is to make it uneconimical for companies to continue practices that damage the environment.
  3. To more than double the cost required for companies to send us junk mail, we need to mail it back to them on their dime.
What you need to do each time you receive a piece of junk mail:

1. Open up the letter and look for a return envelope that says "No Postage Necessary if Mailed in the United States"
2. Place any other content from the letter that doesn't identify you in the return envelope.
3. Seal the envelope and drop it in the mail.

That's it - you're done! That's all it takes to fight back. And it's surprisingly refreshing and therapeutic.

This is especially costly to the junk mailers since they get to send the letter at discount bulk rates but don't have the same luxury, or at least as much of a luxury, for the small volume that gets sent back to them.

If you're bold you can modify the above steps to also include your return address on the envelope. Potentially, this would give the junk mailer the opportunity to remove you from their list, although it is more likely that their processes won't be able to react and they will probably just keep paying extra for their wasteful mailing.

If everyone did this, it would greatly reduce the number of products that could be profitably marketed using wasteful, non-targeted mail, and thus reduce said mail from stuffing our mailboxes.

It takes a lot of resources and energy to create paper, print and process them into mail, and then deliver them to each and every mailbox in America.

Please join the cause!

Thanks,
Brian

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