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"  Every time I open my mailbox at home, I cringe. No, it&amp;#039;s not because it&amp;#039;s overflowing with bills (though, I don&amp;#039;t love those, either). It&amp;#039;s from all the junk mail I receive: endless credit card offers, coupon mailers, catalogs, and charity donate-now requests. All I see are the felled trees -- and the wasted resources -- that went into manufacturing these mailings, which I just toss (or shred, then toss), unread, into the recycling bin. And so, after a little Googling, I&amp;#039;m going to attempt to cut down on my unwanted paper clutter. The steps I&amp;#039;ll take: Remove my name from direct-marketing lists. The Direct Marketing Association, through its DMAChoice program, allows you to &amp;quot;manage&amp;quot; the catalogs and advertisements you receive from its members, which it states account for 80 percent of the offers Americans receive by mail. Registering with the organization -- and, in my case, opting out of everything -- should therefore, in theory, reduce my junk mail by 80 percent. Ask credit card companies to leave me alone. Their offers make up the bulk of my unwanted mail. I&amp;#039;ll register with the Consumer Credit Reporting Industry&amp;#039;s OptOutPrescreen.com. This service is a joint venture of the four major credit bureaus -- Equifax, Experian, Innovis, and TransUnion -- so telling them &amp;quot;thanks, but no thanks&amp;quot; should do the trick. (Tip: Though it asks, you don&amp;#039;t need to enter your social security number into the form.) Stop &amp;quot;resident&amp;quot; mail. This one will prove more challenging, mainly because I pay even less attention to letters from parties who haven&amp;#039;t bothered to &amp;quot;buy&amp;quot; my name. (It goes immediately from mailbox to recycling, without even a pit stop in my apartment for shredding.) The DMA should help, but I&amp;#039;ll also ask the folks at Val Pak to kindly keep their blue envelopes to themselves. In the meantime, I plan to keep better track of generically addressed mail, to see if I&amp;#039;ll need to take further steps later. Because it&amp;#039;ll probably take some time to get off the lists, I&amp;#039;ll report back in a month or two regarding the state of my mailbox. Update: Here&amp;#039;s how it worked. It&amp;#039;s best to shred anything that has your name on it, and imperative to do so for credit card offers and any other mail that has private information. If you find the task tedious, take my colleague Christina Peterson&amp;#039;s advice: Throw a paper-shredding party! Unfortunately, some mail you do have to keep. Learn how to organize your important papers and files. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/institute/a23165/down-with-junk-mail/>