Green Leaf Report

A coworker recently emailed me with a burning request - I’ve never heard an environmental word from her in all the years we’ve known each other, but it seems that she’s just snapped.  It was a very long email that she sent, but the gist of it was she and her husband are inundated with credit card offers in the mail; she received 14 separate offers in the last three days and felt somehow responsible for the destruction of at least one forest.  She wanted to know how to get the unsolicited offers to stop.

I referred her to the FTC website and phone number: 1-888-5-OPTOUT (567-8688), and also asked her to sign the petition to create a ‘do not mail’ registry similar to the ‘do not call’ registry.

100 million trees are destroyed every year just for junk mail (New American Dream Calculation from Conservatree and U.S. Forest Service Statistics).  And a 2% response rate on direct mail marketing is considered successful (what I learned during my MBA marketing classes).  So that’s 98 million trees destroyed every year for absolutely no expected return.

Cutting down trees destroys natural habitats- now I want Noah to come back and save our animals from the flood of American consumerism. Maybe we can be Noah.