Help reduce junk mail coming to your house

Recycling is all well and good, but it's probably better in the long run if we reduced the amount of waste we created in the first place.

One quick and easy way of doing this is to reduce the amount of junk mail you get through your door. All you have to do is go to the Mailing Preferences web site and sign up, they can take your details off around 95% of mailing lists within about 3 months. It is also a criminal offence for companies that are associated with mailing preferences to send you mail once your details have been removed.

I signed up some time ago and also signed up some of the people who used to live at my address who still got junk mail (they have a special section for signing up people who no longer live at your address) and now I don't get any junk addressed to myself at all.

The only junk mail I now get is restaurant menus and the odd bit of post that royal mail gets paid to distribute. All in all it's pretty good.

Another way of stopping yourself from getting onto the mailing lists in the first place is to exclude yourself from the publicly accessible electoral role. This version of the electoral role can be bought by anyone that wants it and it has all of your details on it, well your name and address at least. If when you next fill out your electoral role forms you tick the box to remove yourself then you are making it harder for junk mail senders to get hold of your details. This won't effect things like credit searches etc as banks and other companies buy special copies of the role that you can not be removed from, these usual cost a reasonable amount and their not given out to just anyone.

One last way to reduce the amount of mail coming through your door is to change all your bills to online only billing. At current I've moved all of my utility bills and bank statements over to paperless billing. There are still a few companies that aren't offering this option however they are starting to catch up and soon everyone will provide the option.