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Banning Unsolicited Mailers

Sunny - Thursday, July 20, 2006

I am continually annoyed at the amount of advertisement mail that is sent to individuals via the US Postal Service. It seems that in their struggle to stay pertinent within a world which has many venues for communication and the shipping of parcels that the US Postal Service has become a business of waste and abuse. Within my apartment complex there is a trash can full of advertising mailers that is emptied every week. This amounts to hundreds of pounds of excess material each month and tons of material every year. Multiplied across all of the individuals that receive unsolicited mail this is an enormous amount of paper material on the order of millions of tons. This is just stupid.

I propose that unsolicited mail be banned from delivery and fines be levied against those that send it. A 'do not send me junk mail' list is not appropriate or sufficient. Instead an opt-in system should be created where I can choose to opt in to mailers in general or I can opt-in just for specific mailers from specific companies and groups, or I can even have a set of preferences that detail what type of material would be most suited to my interests. Laws protecting consumers and the environment need to be created and enforced. An opt-in system, both for physical mail, phone solicitation, and email solicitation needs to be implemented. It is far too wasteful to continue wasting our time, energy, and natural resources on such trivially stupid cultural missteps. --sunny 21:41, 20 July 2006 (PDT)

References:

• The Mail Preference Service
• Unsolicited Mail, Telemarketing and Email: Where to Go To “Just Say No” - 1-888-382-1222
• National Do Not Call Registry
• http://www.dmaconsumers.org/offemaillist.html
• Reducing Unsolicited Mail at Your Business
• Ecological Mail Coalition
• Determining Savings from Paper Waste Reduction Programs
• Stop the Junk Mail Service
• Houston-Galveston Area Council - Facts about Junk Mail

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TheLiberal Sat Sep 29 5:39:41 2007

There is not much chance that any banning of unsolicited mail will take affect in the world. But to speak against you sunny, I think it wrong to only accept mail from the same sources as usual. That is like having the entire power of the internet at your fingertips, and only browsing the same website each time. Of course, most junk mail is simply advertisements, but throwing yet another legislation suit at yet another problem in the attempt to regulate yet another aspect of the common good is not the way to do this.

--TheLiberal See above date.

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