Reducing your toxic mail load

Posted on Jul 06, 2008 by Susie Collins in Blog, Healthy Living, Susie Collins

Picking up mail can be difficult for people with chemical sensitivities. The problems are many: perfume laden magazines, ink fumes, the chemicals in the paper, traces of fragrance left on envelopes from the sender. It’s not just the personal mail; if you have a post office box like I do, it’s the assault of fumes coming from everybody else’s mail as well. One trip to pick up the mail or send something off can ruin a whole day for me.

Here’s a great tip on how to reduce your mail load that I just found on the blog The Unobstructed View by Rob Knight. There are lots of reasons why this is a good idea, but in terms of MCS, it reduces your risk of exposure to chemicals that will make you sick. I already pay most of my bills online, but cutting my mail down by 90% sounds fabulous!

In my search to remove myself from the paper nightmare of direct marketing, I discovered that you can also opt-out of pre-screened credit card offers. AWESOME! optoutprescreen.com is a website setup by the Consumer Credit Reporting Industry to allow you to remove yourself from pre-screened credit card offers. Again, the process is simple although it requires more sensitive information: your Social Security number and a valid credit card. This is information they already have and they use it to verify your identity. I wasn’t quite comfortable giving that information out, so I did some poking around and found an article from AARP Magazine recommending optoutprescreen.com. I thought that was a trustworthy endorsement, so I signed up. You can opt-out of pre-screened credit card offers for 5-years or for life. In order to opt-out for life, you have to sign a form and mail it in. I will sacrifice a little paper now to save reams of paper later.

I’m hoping that these two actions alone will reduce my paper mail footprint by more than 90%. In addition, I have all of my bills sent to me via email now and only receive paper bills from a couple of companies.

I have no experience with this particular opt-out company, so do your research first before signing up.

Link

Photo by Chona Kasinger at Flickr.