Earth Day: Clean Out Your Mailbox!
Crystal and I used to get tons of catalogs for stores we’ve shopped at once, maybe a few times and sometimes from stores we’ve never even walked into. Considering many of these catalogs are monthly and some are quarterly/seasonal you begin to see a lot of paper coming into your mailbox and right into (hopefully) your recycle bin. Now, wouldn’t it just be better if you didn’t receive the catalog to begin with? Wouldn’t you rather just receive an updated email when a new sale has launched on the stores website? Well, if you’re trying to cut back on paper waste or answered “Yes, YES, YYEESS!” to either of the prior questions, then CatalogChoice.org is for you!
Catalog Choice is a free service that lets you communicate your mail preferences to companies. Choose which catalogs you no longer wish to receive. Reduce the amount of unsolicited mail in your mailbox and go paperless. Sound good? Click here to get started!
We’ve already managed to cancel 19 catalogs. NINETEEN! How crazy awesome is that? It takes a few mailing cycles for the unsubscriptions to take affect, but once they do you’ll have far fewer catalogs clogging up your mailbox!
The Catalog Choice community is presently 1,130,644 persons strong. They are celebrating the accomplishments of their one million members and 500 catalog partners who together, in just 18 months, have:
* removed over 85 million unwanted catalogs a year from the mail stream.
* Saved more than 192,000 trees and
* Prevented 82 million pounds of greenhouse gas emissions, the equivalent of removing about 7,500 cars off the road (Source: Environmental Defense paper calculator)
The process to setup an account and begin unsubscribing to catalogs is pretty simple. You’re first presented with a basic homepage of options most of which center around managing your unsubscriptions.

The unsubscribe form is pretty simple. You select the persons name that receives the catalog, the address location that the catalog is sent to, plus the Customer # and Source/Key Code on the catalog shipping label.
You complete the form by providing some feedback as to why you’re opting-out of the catalog.

Ok, so this site is great, gets a 5 out of 5 stars from me and is so simple that there’s no reason you shouldn’t go gather up all your unwanted catalogs in your house and opt-out from them now. Oh, and remember to check back with the site when you get additional catalogs in the mail to keep your opt-out list updated. Good luck, happy mailbox de-cluttering, and enjoy a sunny earth day!

Jeff:
Great post … thanks for the 5 star rating. Your blog is gorgeous! We are working on an iPhone app too! Tell all your friends and let’s go paperless!
Chuck
Chuck: An iPhone app, sweet! I can’t wait until that’s live. I’m subscribed to your blog via Google Reader, so hopefully I’ll catch your iPhone app launch there. Keep up the great work, I love your site!
I really liked this post. Can I copy it to my site? Thank you in advance.
Hi, interest post. I’ll write you later about few questions!
@KrisBelucci – go ahead and copy, but please credit this site and link back
@Kelly Brown – feel free to contact me directly, you can get me via various methods, see here for more info: http://www.jeffandcrystal.com/?page_id=530
@Chuck – thought you’d like to know an update on my story was posted on NBC.com as part of their Green Week: http://origin-www.nbc.com/green/2009/11/clean-out-your-mailbox/ Also, any updates on the iPhone app? I can’t seem to find it in the iTunes app store.