Every time I check my mailbox — because some adorable companies still insist on sending me actual paper mail…quaint, no? — I’m amazed at the quantity of junk mail I see. The recycling bins in my building’s mail room are overflowing with flyers, ads…junk mail of every stripe. Seems like such a massive waste.
Of course, until about a year ago, I was one of the people throwing junk mail in there. It was automatic: open the mailbox, sort out what’s useful, toss the rest in the bin and off I went. Finally, and I don’t know remember what prompted me to do it exactly, I printed a small ‘no junk mail please’ graphic that I downloaded from Red Dot Campaign and stuck it in my mailbox. Since then…no junk mail. At all. None. The odd bit of marketing disguised as a letter sneaks through (damn realtors!) but 95% of the time…junk free.
So yeah…I no longer get all this paper & plastic that I have to throw out. The delivery guy no longer has to bother stuffing my mailbox. The cleaning people who gather up the recycling have that much less crap to cart away. And it was easy to do. And it cost me nothing.
You need to get in on this action, people. If we can inadvertently kill newspapers, we can kill junk mail.
Skirl | Dan Dickinson 
I’m not being snarky, this is a legitimate question. Since a good portion of the junk comes with the mailman, and is usually sorted before he arrives at your building, what does he do with the stuff for your mailbox?
I’d like to stop junk also. Living in a condo now, rather than a house, I’ve noticed a decrease in the volume. But I think the decrease is primarily from flyer distributers not Canada Post.
Do you know if there’s a way to stop junk at the Postal Station. Did your little sign stop the postman from adding junk to your mail at the Post Office?
Good question. I don’t know the exact answer, but thinking logically (as I’m sure our postal service & government always do) the carrier would be given the estimated required flier packages at the beginning of the route, and would return with the difference. Since the carriers have an incentive to carry only as much as required, I would think there’s some sort of feedback mechanism to let their bosses know that they need less junk mail next time. This *should* work back up the chain to reduce the amount printed, though that obviously takes time.
Whether this happens today, it seems logical, and you can spot financial incentive to feed information back into the system and adjust. Unless the carriers get paid to take more junk mail, in which case they just dump them in a garbage can, but I don’t think that’s the case.
Anyway, all we can do is whatever’s in our control, and raise hell about the rest, right?