The amount of unsolicited mail through the door used to be enormous. Supermarkets, pizza take-aways, furniture shops, paint shops, IKEA guides....
Only a fraction of that was useful and even then, most
of it is available online. We decided to force this mountain of paper down as efficiently
as we could.
I sent some 20 letters to people and businesses asking
them – to some gently, and to some more aggressively – to stop sending us junk
mail.
I deliberately sent letters by post and not by e-mail
to give my message some sense of urgency and importance. Although I don’t usually
use paper myself in such situations, I believe a paper letter can have more
impact than an e-mail.
1.
The
first issue is unaddressed advertising
Article
101 of the Belgian Police Code stipulates that it is prohibited to
distribute unaddressed advertising to residents who have clearly indicated they
do not want to receive it.
Easy! That
will get rid of a lot of the junk mail. I ordered a sticker from the
municipality of Antwerp (no unaddressed advertising through this letter box)
and received four by mail the next week. I stuck one on the letter box. The
weekly leaflets from the local supermarkets stopped coming immediately. That
was the biggest lot.
But
unsolicited and unaddressed spam still arrived eventually. I started sending
letters back to the people responsible, making them aware of Article 101 of the
police code and telling them that we no longer wished to receive unsolicited
mail, and that if they continued to send it, I would report it to the
police.
2.
Then
there is spam addressed to us
Ahhh, I love
this one: the GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, a useful tool in
the fight against spam.
My husband
and I are both self-employed which means our data is publicly available so we
receive a lot of addressed spam. But this does not mean that our data can be
used for just any purpose without our consent.
Every
unsolicited letter that comes through our mailbox addressed to me or my husband
gets a letter back from me ordering them, by virtue of article 17 of the GDPR,
to delete our data from their records, since we never gave them permission to
process our data in the first place. And if there is a legitimate reason to process
our data, to let us know what that legitimate reason is.
3.
Addressed
information leaflets
Then there
are the addressed information leaflets. For instance, the travel insurer
sending us their monthly magazine with travel tips.
I sent two
friendly letters, one to our travel insurer, and one to the health insurer,
thanking them for their efforts to inform us on what they believe is important,
but to stop sending these periodicals because we don’t read them anyway. I
received friendly replies informing me that they would stop sending me their
information leaflets.
4.
Special case
There
is one addressee in particular to whom I sent a special letter: the Vlerick
management school. I received a leaflet from them announcing their courses on
offer. It was addressed to my office and wrapped in cellophane. For a
management school, creating the managers of the future, I thought that was not
good enough.
Call
me naïve, but I decided to write to them. I asked them to reconsider the use of
cellophane for the distribution of their leaflets. I did a quick calculation of
the number of lawyers they must have sent it to (I had received it so all
lawyers, at least in Antwerp, must have received it) and thus, the amount of
cellophane sent straight into the environment. For an institution producing the
managers of the future how could they not be more environmentally aware?
Less
than a week later, they wrote back to me, by email, thanking me for holding a
mirror in front of them and informing me of the fact that they had already had
a team meeting about this and had informed their suppliers of their wish to
change.
Well,
I don’t know if they actually will or not, but I will continue to write
letters. Every penny that drops will raise awareness further and will lead to a
better future for us all!
5.
The impact
Environmental
impact
I
need to wait and see what this does to our mailbox but the impact is already huge,
given that the weekly advertising (which was the biggest chunk of it) stopped
arriving. I will report back to you after a couple of months.
Financial
impact
Apart
from the initial letters and stamps, the financial impact is zero.
Space
impact
We
win because we no longer have to stock all the paper until the bin men come to
collect it.
Time
and effort impact
With
the exception of the initial efforts of sending the letters, we win because we
don’t have to bother with all that paper waste anymore.
The
only downside
We
no longer have any idea what the week’s special offers are in the Aldi. A tough
sacrifice, but one we’re coping with.
