How we got rid of junk mail

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.