Lifestyle Upgrades

In a prior post, I gave three quick ways to greatly reduce the volume of junk mail and telemarketing calls that you receive.  Those tips do not cover “Current Resident” mailings or some Catalog mailings, particularly from companies you may have ordered from in the past.  Well, here are 3 quick, FREE ways to reduce your catalog and current resident junk mail.

 1) Opt-out of Val-Pak coupon mailings.  These guys are high volume “current resident” mailers, and the mailing are untargeted.  It’s like blanketing the Earth with random flyers and hoping that people will buy things from you.

2) Opt-out of ADVO mailings.  This is the same type of mailing as Val-Pak.

3) The best one that I’ve seen is CatalogChoice.org  This site allows you to specifically seek out catalogs that you are receiving and get your name off the list. 

The purpose here is threefold.  Getting less junk mail simplifies your life.  There is less garbage to throw away or recycle this way.  Next, there is a positive environmental impact, which CatalogChoice articulates nicely.  Finally, the less of this junk that you get, the less likely you’ll be to buy things that you don’t need AND encourage more companies to send you even more catalogs to repeat the cycle!

It may be possible to reduce our energy consumption simply by doing our Google searches in black.  The basic idea is that it may consume less energy to render a black web page than a white web page, and since Google is used so frequently, all those little bits of energy savings add up.  The full story and further subsequent research on the subject seems to say searching in black can’t hurt, and it may in fact help reduce energy consumption as originally hypothesized.  There are a few places where black versions of Google Custom Search are already available, but I couldn’t help but put up my own, since it was just so easy.