Catalog Choice to opt out of receiving paper catalogs

Posted on 28 August 2008 
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Catalog ChoiceCatalog Choice is a free service for US residents who wish to opt out of receiving paper catalogs through the mail. Whilst it relies on the merchants to voluntarily honour the requests their list of endorsements is long. You simply sign up for free and then select the catalogs you wish to decline. If the catalog isn’t listed then you can suggest it for inclusion. The benefits are for both the senders and the receivers because the senders get to reduce the number of catalogs delivered (by only sending to people interested in them) and hence the cost of production whilst the receivers get less clutter in the mail boxes.

Environmentally speaking the benefits are huge. According to the site, there are more than 19 billion paper catalogs delivered each year. Just imagine the lost sforests, carbon emission in producing and delivering them and then the problems of what to do with them once they have been used. Annually it accounts for 53 million trees and around 53 billion gallons of water discharges from the volume of paper required. that’s 81000 Olympic sized pools. The power used in production is roughly the same as the annual power usage of 1.2 million homes. Truly staggering.

Of course they have a strict privacy policy and you can find out all the details at Catalog Choice.

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