Get rid of your junk mail with the help of GreenDimes
My junk mail hit critical mass when I came home from work one day in December and found twenty catalogs. In addition to the usual suspects, like the weekly Pottery Barn catalog, there were weird, useless catalogs, too, like for off-price garden equipment and hideous acrylic rugs.
As a result of all my online purchasing, I was on every mailing list in the free world. The green guilt from all that paper was crippling, even though I recycled every scrap of it. So I did some research and found relief through a local company called GreenDimes.
GreenDimes makes it easy for you to get off junk mail lists, and boasts that they can reduce the straight-to-recycling-bin volume of your mail by 90%! My favorite part is the catalog screening tool that centralizes the "take me off your list" process for hundreds of catalogs.
There are three levels of GreenDimes membership:
- Free gets you opt out information and access to the catalog screener
- Premium ($20) gets you additional customer service and account monitoring, plus they plant five trees on your behalf
- GreenDimes Bundle ($36) gets you all of the above, plus a reusable bag, a t-shirt, two energy-saving light bulbs and a children's book
It's a great program that made a huge difference in my mailbox, although those Pottery Barn people are like the catalog mafia. They keep pulling me back!
Another great thing about GreenDimes is that they voluntarily provide real time data about impact of their efforts. A streaming counter on the site shows you: the number of people helped (278,547) catalogs stopped (2,190,718) and the number of trees planted (1.053,409.) The most impressive number is pounds of junk mail stopped: 8,271,459 and counting.
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