Reduce Your Waste Footprint

Reducing waste isn’t just about keeping stuff out of your trash can. It’s about making smart choices as consumers to prevent the destruction of our natural resources—trees, water, petroleum and the like—that are used to make unnecessary, single-use or otherwise trashy products. The following five pages have simple ways you can have your products and a clean environment too.

NEW: A Zero Waste Program for You

Stop Junk Mail for GOOD and Save our Natural Resources

Eco-Cycle has partnered with Catalog Choice—the best mail preference service in the nation—to stop unwanted waste in Boulder County and make this $20/account service available to residents and businesses at no charge.

Getting rid of unwanted mail has become a daily ritual in our culture. Piles of flyers, coupons and even phone books show up on our doorsteps unannounced.

Sure, we can recycle it all and feel good about that. But there is a much bigger environmental problem with junk mail that recycling can’t solve: Much of it is made from trees that are clearcut at an alarming rate from the Boreal Forest of northern Canada. These trees are not only home to hundreds of species of animals and thousands of species of plants, but they are also essential to one million indigenous people who live in the forest.

Go beyond recycling for a Zero Waste solution

We need to prevent the destruction of these forests in the first place—enter our newest service: Stop Junk Mail for GOOD.

Sign Up Today at No Charge

The service, worth $20/account, is available to you as a Boulder County resident or business at NO CHARGE. You can choose which pieces of mail you don’t want and make your name and address “unlisted” to prevent marketers from sharing and selling your personal information in the future.

Go to www.ecocycle.org/junkmail:

1. Click the “sign up” link and then fill out the form to set up your free account.

2. Activate your account by checking for an email from Catalog Choice and clicking on the confirmation link. (It may be in your spam folder.)

3. Enter the names of catalogs, phone books and companies that send you mail you do not want.

Support Our Program with a Donation

Eco-Cycle is footing the bill to make this Zero Waste service available to all Boulder County businesses and residents free of charge. You can help us cover our costs by donating directly to this campaign. Donate $10 or more online at www.ecocycle.org/junkmail.

Once You Get Off Junk Mail STAY Off with these 5 tips

Unless you adopt five important new habits, you may find yourself right back on those marketers’ lists.

#1: Use the magic words “Please do not rent, sell or trade my name or address” EVERY TIME you give out your address, whether you’re placing an order for a product, making a donation, or when a cashier at a store asks for your info.

# 2: Prevent credit card and insurance offers – Reduce your junk mail and protect your identity by preventing "pre-screened" offers. Visit www.optoutprescreen.com or call 1-800-5-OPTOUT.

# 3: Prevent charity solicitations – If you contribute once a year to a charitable organization, ask them to send you only one donation request per year, or ask if they can send you a paperless request via email.

# 4: Watch out for warranties, contests and free offers – Their purpose is often to obtain your name for mailing lists or to sell you something. If you do sign up for one, be sure to use the magic words (see #1).

# 5: 1-800-NO THANKS – When you receive a catalog or publication you don’t want, take the 30 seconds it requires to nip it in the bud. Call the company’s 1-800 number to have your name removed from their list.

Zero Waste Around the World

Seattle, WA is the first community in the country to require phone book manufacturers to fund an opt-out program so people can stop unwanted phone books, and to reimburse the city for its costs to collect and recycle old phone books every year. San Francisco, CA is running a three-year pilot program where residents do not receive phone books unless they opt in to receive a book. 

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