Green Tip #5: Save Some (a Lotta) Trees... Go Paperless!

Hello friends!
It's been a while since the last post. Well... despite best intentions, Summer 2008 turned out to be as busy as summers tend to be... and I didn't get a chance to write. Well, now that the kids are back in school, and Fall is officially here, its time to revive our Green Tips.

So here's Tip # 5: Switch to Paperless Billing and Cut Down on Junk Mail!

To be honest, our switch to paperless billing didn't start off as an attempt to go green. Like most families, 95% of the mail we get is a mix of catalogs we never requested, coupons we'll never use, and credit card offers we'll never take advantage of. The other 5% is legit mail - bills, catalogs we did request, and the occasional personal letters...

So one day the inevitable happened... I missed a bill in the enormous pile of junk mail. And that was enough :)

We looked into how we could eliminate paper bills altogether, and found that most financial institutions, utility, mortgage, and insurance companies offer customers the ability to switch to e-bills and paperless statements.

Your preference may vary, but the easiest way for us to do this was to create a separate email account that we use exclusively for this purpose. It may take one or two billing cycles until the switch is complete, so be on the lookout for snail mail and email statements during the changeover.

We've been paperless for almost a year now, and I have to say it's so much easier to login to an email account dedicated to this purpose than wading through a whole bunch of junk mail to find an errant bill or statement...

Worried about not having any paper trail in case disaster strikes? Maybe a system failure or hacker attack? We look out for the annual summary statements for our paperless accounts, and print and file those away - we're still using less paper than if we were receiving monthly statements!

OK, now that we've taken care of the 5% of the mail we receive... how about the other 95% of junk mail that we never wanted in the first place?!

Did you know?

• Junk mail in the U.S. accounts for over 100,000,000,000 pieces of mail each year - about 30% of all the mail delivered in the world.
• Every year American households receive a total of 104.7 billion pieces of junk mail or 848 pieces of junk mail per household, which requires 6.5 million tons of paper.
• Approximately 44% of junk mail goes to landfills unopened; the average American will spend 8 months of their lives dealing with junk mail.
• It would take the equivalent of over 500,000 garbage truck loads to dump all junk mail into landfills and incinerators each year.
• By the year 2010, almost 50% of the solid mass that makes up our landfills is expected to be paper and paperboard waste.
• State and local governments and their citizens spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year to collect and dispose of all the bulk mail that does not get recycled.
• 6.5 million tons of discounted (bulk mailing) junk mail entered the U.S. municipal solid waste stream in 2006.

I recently came across this website Catalog Choice - a free service that contacts merchants for you to decline paper catalogs you don't need. So I've requested to be taken off from the mailing list of about 15 catalogs, and I can add more as I remember them. I'm curious to see (a) whether this works, and (b) how long it takes till we actually see a drop in the quantity of our junk mail. Catalog Choice maintains it may take up to 10 weeks for my request to be processed, so we shall see.

I'm curious whether anyone has tried a service like Catalog Choice, and what your experience has been...

Resources:
New American Dream Junk Your Junk Mail Campaign
Environmental Defense Fund Paper Calculator - Tool to help you quantify the benefits of better paper choices.
Sign up for the Do Not Mail Campaign - A campaign to stop junk mail similar in concept to the Do Not Call Registry.