Reducing Catalog Waste

A friend of mine sent me this info. about stopping unwanted catalogs from landing in your mailbox. The website www.catalogchoice.org is a free service that will contact the companies for you and have you removed from their mailing list. It takes just a minute to login, find the catalogs, and process your request. So much easier that trying to contact individual companies, and much better for the environment. Check out the environmental impacts of catalogs below (taken from the Catalog Choice website).

Each year, 19 billion catalogs are mailed to American consumers.

What's the impact?

• Number of trees used - 53 million trees
• Pounds of paper used - 3.6 million tons of paper
• Energy used to produce this volume of paper - 38 trillion BTUs, enough to power 1.2 million homes per year
• Contribution to global warming - 5.2 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions, equal to the annual emissions of two million cars
• Waste water discharges from this volume of paper - 53 billion gallons of water, enough to fill 81,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools

Environmental impact estimates were made using the Environmental Defense paper calculator.