Wednesday, October 24, 2007

The Public Citizen

Over eight million tons of trees are consumed each year in the production of paper catalogs!!!!!

As many of you know, nothing stirs my ire more then the enormous amount of junk mail I magnetically attract wherever I go. Not spam, physical junk mail. I have multiple tools to combat this problem. I
a) Rip off the back covers and call the magazines with my customer id demanding to be taken off. Date the call on the cover, xerox all the covers on one or two pieces of papers for record.
b) Put the offensive, tree killing material in the return to sender envelop and scrawl stop mailing me across the offending material
c) List myself on the "do not mail" register of the Direct Mail Association
https://www.directmail.com/directory/mail_preference/
d) List myself on the catalog choice website- newest and greatest weapon against junk mail as it is sponsored by the NRDC , National Wildlife Federation and Ecology Center
http://www.catalogchoice.org/
e) Call/email the political campaigns that mail me everyday and ask them how environmentally concerned they are (Note: this does not work as well, but gives me comfort).

Ok- so what's my point? Here it is. Today, I sat down for my usual combat. I was armed with the numbers of the offenders- this time it was mainly political organizations: The Hillary Clinton campaign (one of the absolute worst offenders, btw), the DNCC, the food bank, NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council, NARAL, NCTE, America Votes. I also called a few catalogs, Victoria's Secret, Garnett Hill, even the owner of my website, Domain Registry of America just for balance. No problem, they all said. We'd be happy to take you off our mailing list. All except Public Citizen. I mention this because I find it extremely paradoxical that Victoria's Secret can take me off its list, but the one organization that defines itself as the "public interest organization" that explicity states on its website that it "fight[s] for openness and democratic accountability in government... [and] for strong health, safety and environmental protections" (http://www.citizen.org/about/) flatly ans absolutely REFUSED to take me off their mailing list. This has never happened before. Never,ever, in my two years of calling business, non profits and lobbies has an organization flatly refused to take me off their mailing list. But there is was the Public Citizen refused to take me off their mailing list. Wow.

2 comments:

BradyDale said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Avoidmaroon said...

Add to that total all the petroleum used to produce/deliver all this crap. Start a petition.