Last
Sunday I did something good for the planet, something I’d been planning to do
when recovering from my knee replacement. Pain pill effects got in the way, so
sooner became later, but determination and the two-foot tall pile of catalogs
we kept having to walk around and move from place to place on the couch finally
sealed the deal.
In
the last two months my husband and I have received 105 unrequested, unwelcome
catalogs in the mail. I had noticed the pile burgeoning during those two
months, but until I actually counted them, I had no idea there were so many. I
knew they arrived in our post office box every day, giant wads of them that we
then were obliged to carry to our car and home and then our garbage can and
that alone irritated me. Now that I know how many avalanched into our mailbox,
no wonder I felt aggravation mounting.
The
past holiday season, when the baskets I lugged were full, not with gifts, but with
catalogs, I decided I needed to give Catalog Choice another chance to ease the
barrage of unsolicited marketing in our mail. Have you heard of Catalog Choice?
Back
in 2007, wondering what to do with my proliferating pile of waste junk mail, I
came across the website www.catalogchoice.org
and voilà, there was my answer. I typed in the proper box the name of the
company sending me the catalog, any numbers and codes associated with my name,
hit the “submit” box, and my problems would be solved, or so I hoped. The amount of catalogs force-fed into my
mailbox dwindled.
Some
companies, however, did not comply with my wishes to terminate the one-sided
relationship. Their spokespeople told
Catalog Choice that they made more money by sending out catalogs willy-nilly
than by any other form of advertising, so they refused to stop. Those catalogs
I kept receiving. Even though I refused
to buy even one product ever again from those companies, mailing lists containing
our address were sold to other catalogs, and again we’d arrive at the post
office to find a box crammed with mailings we hadn’t asked for.
While
that was inconvenient, what really bothered me was the thought of so much waste
of resources, all that timber being cut, all that hauling on our already
overtaxed highways, and all the flying using so much gasoline, a non-renewable
and shrinking resource. The accumulation of printing by-products so toxic to
our environment upset me. I thought of
the metals in the ink used and wondered how that broke down in the landfills,
and here on the coast where it rains most of the time, the watersheds. (In my dad’s time when outhouses were common,
at least the catalog pages could be used for another purpose, but we don’t have
an outhouse, and I wouldn’t want to use the toxic ink and tough, slick paper for
such a delicate task anyway.)
According
to Wikipedia, three main environmental issues with ink are volatile organic
compounds (VOC’s), heavy metals and non-renewable oils. I don’t know that the ancient Tibetan
techniques of making ink from soot, earth, puffballs, dung, fruit and a yellow
fungus were any better.
Working
as a printer can be hazardous to one’s health, a fact I wasn’t happy reading
since my son spent several years in that occupation. VOC’s are emitted as the ink dries; the
metallic pigments can result in environmental and worker health hazards; and
the main oils in non-vegetable based inks are petroleum-based, non-renewable
resources.
I
felt gratified to read that in recent years more companies in the UK and USA are
reverting to vegetable-based inks again which have lower VOC’s, use renewable
resources, and utilize non-metallic inks which come off when the paper is
recycled. Also, the process doesn’t use water in the print process where it had
been before, thereby rendering it another toxic by-product.
I’m
thrilled to see that our post office now has a row of recycling bins lined up
to take the catalog offal away where I assume it’s being re-used in a
beneficial way. But still, what a waste
of resources and time to produce something undesirable and rejected.
Worries
about sustainability aside, I also thought about all the human labor in
writing, photographing, printing, and assembling a catalog. The postage.
What must be a huge cost for a company, all totaled, so a catalog could
be sent to someone who didn’t even want one.
Because
by 2007, and even more so now six years later, most of our shopping in our
little rural town is done online. We google
the product we want and go from there.
Yes, we use electricity and a computer /keyboard made from toxic materials,
but we’re not tossing them out every day.
That’s
why last Sunday I sat down for a couple of hours and typed 105 names of
companies into my Catalog Choice account. Two companies have already received
my message and one has responded with an assurance I will not see another
catalog from that source. The planet and I are awaiting some relief.
