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Getting Rid of Junk Mail: DMA and other choices

The City is planning to make us put our garbage in new green bins for pickup in front of our houses, instead of in the giant communal bins in the alley. This will mean two space-consuming hulks in my garage instead of one—the blue recycling bin, which is picked up in front, resides in there now. My house has no place in front to stash an unsightly plastic garbage bin, and I don’t want it in my gardeny backyard, which I use as living space. So I’ve decided to put the blue barrel in the alley (there’s no law in Phoenix requiring residents to recycle) and put all the trash in the garbage.

So much trash arrives in the mail that most weeks just the junk mail alone fills about a third to a half of the blue bin. By way of not filling up the new bin so the garbage won’t fit, I finally got around to asking the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) to take me off its members’ mailing lists. This, we’re told, is the answer to all your junk mail problems.

Not quite.

In the first place, registering for DMA is a hassle. You either have to send them an application by snail mail along with a check for $1.00 (yeah!), or you have to register on line, requiring you jump through a long series of hoops and give them an e-mail address. Once you’re finally in, you get to jump through MORE hoops.

What is it about “I don’t want to get junk from anyone that should be so hard to express?

You have to go to several subsites at the DMA page to request removal from several different categories of mailing lists: credit card offers, catalogs, magazine offers, and “other mail offers.”

Click on “credit offers,” and you get to jump through another set of hoops, this one requiring you to divulge your Social Security number. Then you have to print out your request and mail it to Experian, apparently the only one of the four credit bureaus (there’s a new one!) to receive it. Go to “other mail offers,” and you’re presented with seven pages of marketers. You have to go to each one individually and beg to be removed from their nuisance-mail lists! About 99 percent of these are irrelevant: when was the last time you got an ad from ADT Security or Casino Windsor? From what I can tell, the worst offenders are not on this list.

Moving on to “magazine offers,” you come upon a two-page list of 36 magazines. Again, you have to manually contact every single one of them to beg them to stop sending you “offers.”

Like I have nothing better to do with my time?

The outfits that really blitz you with trash are not on these lists. Nor are the chain grocery stores that fill your mailbox with newspaper pullouts advertising “deals” on piles and piles of junk food.

If you seriously want to reduce the amount of trash delivered to your recycling bin through the mails, be prepared to spend a lot of time and some money. Go here to discover the endless series of hoop-jumps you’ll have go through to stem the tide of junkmail pouring into your home.

Valassis and Red Plum, which evidently are responsible for a fair amount of trash, provide a single page that promises to remove your name from their lists (eventually). So does ValPack, which is in the business of sending you blue packages full of coupons for things you never buy—unless you’re into junk food.

Really, every time the Postal Service announces it’s in the red and may go out of business, I think I won’t weep much when that happens. Surely UPS and FedEx will cost junk mailers so much they’ll quit sending piles of useless paper to everyone in creation. Then no doubt they’ll try to get our e-mail addresses and blitz us there.

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2 thoughts on “Getting Rid of Junk Mail: DMA and other choices”

  1. Yeah! Screw recycling! It’s too much work to save resources for future generations and preserve the planet.

    • @ Andy: How would you like to come by three or four times a week and help an old lady with all the physical work around this place? While you’re at it, you can build a structure in the front — acceptable in appearance to the neighbors — to shelter two five-foot-high trash bins, and you can lay a concrete pad and a concrete path to roll these things out to the street through the environmentally friendly but fragile xeriscape that will be wrecked by hauling things back and forth. Of course, you’ll pay for these projects, since I sure as hell can’t afford them on Social Security — you being committed, as you are, to recycling and future generations, right?

      The truth is, the City of Phoenix accepts very few items for recycling that are not biodegradable. The plastic overpackaging that comes with goods from vendors such as Costco and Walmart, for example, are not acceptable. Neither are items like paper towels. Or plastic bags. The City has a Trash Cop who comes around and checks inside people’s recycling bins, issuing fines to those who offend by dumping incorrect plastics and other undesirable items. Since I don’t eat processed foods, I don’t drink pop, and the water I drink comes out of the tap, very little other than junk mail and newspapers goes into my recycling bin except material that can be composted, which is what it will do in the city dump just as surely as it would do in my compost bin.

      Sometimes it’s wise to sit on one’s arrogance until one knows whereof one speaks. 😉

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