Fisher wants to free you from snail-mail spam

Junk mail is sort of like the postal equivalent of fast food — high on packaging, short on substance, it might look appealing at first (You’ve won a Caribbean vacation package!) but ultimately ends up as garbage.

According to the Center for a New American Dream, 5.8 million tons of catalogs and other direct mailings ended up in the U.S. municipal solid-waste stream in 2005 — enough to fill 450,000 garbage trucks. The same group reports that 100 million trees’ worth of bulk mail arrive in American mailboxes every year, yet 44 percent of those special offers and faux vacation packages are chucked directly into the wastebasket without ever being opened.

Trimming junk-mail fat isn’t exclusively an environmental issue, says Joshua Martin of the local citizens’ group Freedom From Junk Mail North Carolina, based here in Asheville. Much like the federal do-not-call list, which gives citizens the right to opt out of being phoned by telemarketers, establishing a similar option to cut off the flow of junk mail would protect personal rights to privacy, he and others argue.

Martin has brought the matter to the attention of Rep. Susan Fisher, who in turn introduced H1699, an act that would effectively establish the junk-mail version of the do-not-call list.  North Carolina is the 14th state to introduce such legislation; if passed, it would become effective Jan. 1, 2008.

Martin says he anticipates a positive response to the bill. “Everyone from my grandma to my activist friends thinks this is a good idea,” he told Xpress.

— Rebecca Bowe, editorial assistant

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4 thoughts on “Fisher wants to free you from snail-mail spam

  1. hobart

    Doesn’t seem like a bad idea… but doesn’t that kinda kill off a pile of postal service jobs?

  2. rbowe

    I’m glad you brought that up. And you’re right, not everyone thinks this is a good idea, particularly the folks whose jobs might be threatened by the legislation if it passed. This didn’t make it into my post, but Josh Martin mentioned that in other states where this bill has been introduced, the greatest opposition came from the postal worker’s union. Here’s an article about it: http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/4457

    — Rebecca Bowe

  3. curmudgeon

    Why is it that in our great market-driven capitalist society we tolerate an antiquated socialistic dinosaur like the US Postal Service? I say shut it down and let UPS and FedEx fight it out for our stamp dollars. Paper mail is only very few years away from obsolete anyway.

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