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.