In this day and age getting junk mail into your email inbox is annoying, but thankfully most email providers will filter a great deal of that into spam so that it doesn’t bother you. Sadly in the case of paper junk mail, there is nobody there who can help you to filter out the junk from the stuff you need, which is why it is important that you take action, and it is not only to reduce your stress levels.

Junk mail is more than a nuisance: unsolicited mail has a tremendous negative impact on the environment. Approximately 96 million trees are destroyed each year in the United States alone to produce junk mail, and 10 to 24 billion gallons of water are used to produce the paper. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that more than 4 million tons of junk mail are produced each year in the United States, and more than 50 percent of this unsolicited mail is not recycled, which means it ends up in landfills.

For these two reasons it is vital that you know what to do in order to minimize junk mail, and here are some tips to follow in order to do just that.

Be Attentive

The first step is to be attentive and stop junk mail before it starts. When you are donating money, buying from catalogues or even filling out forms, there is now a section which you can tick that will prevent anyone from contacting you via mail. You have to be careful here because they word it in such a way that saying nothing means they assume you want the contact, which of course you do not.

Don’t Respond

There is a temptation to write ‘Return to Sender’ on the mail and then post it back, but this is no good in terms of waste and energy usage, and you are far better just not responding at all. When you respond it is likely that your name and address will have been taken by someone else, which is only going to start the whole process off again.

Notify on Your Own if You Move

There are some services which suggest that they will help you to change addresses with businesses when you move, or stop the junk, but very often this is just a reuse to get you to give your new address out. The best thing that you can do is to contact businesses which you do use individually in order to let them know you have moved, and make it clear that you do not give your permission for them to share your details.

Register to Remove Name

There is an online register which you can find that will remove your name entirely from 3rd party companies which you have not registered to, do this and you can kiss goodbye to a large amount of that junk mail which has been coming through your letterbox.

Remember that junk mail is way more than a nuisance, it is a damaging activity for the planet.