You are a paper saving animal! You recycle every piece of paper that goes through your home. You always bring your own mug to the coffee shop so you won’t have to use a non-recyclable paper one. You never print anything at home or in the office unless it’s absolutely necessary. Great! But there’s something more you could be doing to save paper: keeping junk mail out of your mailbox! Junk mail is not only annoying as all get out but about 100 million trees are destroyed each year to produce it. How would you like to be the tree that’s felled just to be reincarnated as the 106th unsolicited credit card offer you received this month?
Thankfully, you can put a stop to the majority of the junk mail you receive in several ways. 41pounds.org is a fantastic organization that will stop 80 to 95% of junk mail for five years in exchange for a small fee, more than a third of which is then donated to an environmental or community organizations of your choice. You can also “opt-out” of receiving credit card offers on your own thanks to the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), which gives you the right to prevent Consumer Credit Reporting Companies from providing your credit file information to the people sending you all those credit card offers. Visit OptOutprescreen.com to exercise your right and save innocent trees!
Read her tips for going green:
http://blog.michellekaufmann.com/?cat=9
I will be working this year to make the big conference that I organize, Architecture Exchange East, as green as possible, both in the implementation and the planning. How can you do that? For instance, planning meetings will have pitchers of water instead of bottled, and there will be no duplicated handouts. At the event itself, we will post all powerpoints, handouts, etc., on the web site for download instead of passing out tons of paper. Those are just a couple of things, we'll be doing more. A major agenda item at our first planning meeting on January 23 will be how we can make ArchEx greener.
Feel free to post ideas!
