MOUNT VERNON — Charlene Hill stopped sorting the sizable stack of letters and catalogs on her kitchen table to open one particularly eye-catching envelope.
“Look at this,” she said. “I’ve been preapproved for a $50,000 line of credit.”
She smiled and tossed the letter on the pile with all the other junk mail.
“Now what are we going to do with that but get ourselves in trouble?” she asked.
Throwing out junk mail has become a daily ritual for Hill, who lives just south of Mount Vernon with her husband, Wilbur. And for this retired couple, the routine is growing old.
“Most of this stuff,” said Hill, pointing toward a stack of retail catalogs, credit card offers and brochures, “I just throw away. It’s just a shame. It’s a waste of money.”
The Hills aren’t the only ones annoyed by the deluge of junk mail they receive every day. Several national campaigns are targeting junk mail and the companies that send it. Whether they are trying to reduce environmental waste or whether they just want to eliminate the hassle associated with a kitchen table buried in mail, the goal is the same: To stop junk mail.
According to ForestEthics, which launched a “Do Not Mail” campaign in March, the average American household receives 800 pieces of junk mail every year, and more than 100 million trees are cut down to provide the necessary paper for all that mail.
“I think the most startling statistic regarding junk mail is that 30 percent of all the mail delivered in the world is U.S. junk mail,” said Will Craven, a spokesman for ForestEthics. “The question is, why are we receiving one-third of all the world’s mail when we don’t want it and didn’t ask for it?”
ForestEthics is sponsoring a petition that asks Congress to create a Do Not Mail Registry, similar to the Do Not Call Registry created in 2003. The petition already has more than 46,000 signatures.
A bill to reduce junk mail may or may not become a reality, but there are options for those hoping to reduce the amount of junk mail they receive. Web sites such as dmachoice.org/mps, catalogchoise.org and stopthejunkmail.com offer services that remove consumers’ names from mailing lists, and optoutsprescreen.com can help thin the stack of unwanted credit card offers.
Some of the services cost more than others, and none of them are guaranteed to completely eliminate junk mail. For people like the Hills, however, any little reduction would help.
“It seems like it’s getting worse. Maybe we didn’t pay attention to the amount of mail we received before, but when the children finished college, it seems we started to receive more and more,” Hill said.
She feels like she can’t do much to change it.
“I’ve tried calling credit card companies to ask them to stop sending me offers,” Hill said. “They just called me back to ask why I didn’t want a credit card, and the mail didn’t stop.”
Craven, though, said he’s hopeful junk mail will one day become a thing of the past.
“Sending junk mail is a 20th century practice that can’t continue,” he said.
