Being the Administrative Assistant here at BG, I go through the mail everyday. I am amazed at the amount of junk mail this office receives. Catalog after catalog, mailer after mailer. It is quite overwhelming and makes me a little sick because all I do with all that stuff is throw it into the recycle bin.  As mentioned before in Jon’s blog, we conducted a one week experiment to see how much junk mail our office received. After just ONE week of everyone saving their direct mail, we had over 14 lbs of JUNK. Here is a little reminder picture of what all that junk looked like.

As part of our effort to become a more eco-friendly company, I did some research to find out how to stop this overload of direct mail. I found some pretty great tips on the Privacy Rights Clearing House website. I wanted to share a few with you. These tips were taken directly from their website:

Pre-Approved Offers of Credit:

1. To have your name removed from this particular mailing list, you must contact the credit reporting agencies directly by mail or phone.  You can find the addresses and numbers for these agencies here.

US Postal Service Change of Address:

1. To notify senders of a change of address, it is better to contact your credit card companies, family, friends, utilities,  and magazines directly to avoid the junk mail following you to your new address.
2. If you fill out a change of address form at the post office they in turn will send out a change of address card to mailers who have your old address. This will include any current junk mail you are receiving.

To remove yourself from as many national mailings as possible:

1. Contact the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) sign up for their Mail Preference Service (MPS). Once you register your name will be put into a “do not mail” file that is updated monthly. You MUST re-register after three years. There is a $1 charge to register by mail. Their address is: Mail Preference Service , Attention Dept: 27478505, Direct Marketing Association, PO Box 282 Carmel, NY 10512.
2. Or Register with the DMA online here: DMA Choice Website

These are just a few tips from their website. It was pretty helpful to me and I hope it will be as helpful to you. (I did find a few errors on their page regarding the DMA and I have made the changes here on this blog.)  Let’s all send a message to companies who use direct mail marketing by taking our names off the list. If enough of us do it who knows we might start  something. Maybe they will try using Social Media instead.