Recently I received some pretty disgusting junk mail from some so called Saint Mathew’s Church in Oklahoma, and I discovered a way to opt out of junk mail on  case by case basis: USPS Form 1500. This form tells the USPS not to send any mail from the offending company. Form 1500 must not be used much because the neither the clerk nor the manager had seen it before. While the form is designed to stop the receipt of unwanted pornography, the supreme court in Rowan v. USPS stated that only the addressee can determine what they believe is pornographic. If a person feels a dry-goods catalog is pornographic, then they can request it not be sent. The junk mail from Saint Mathew’s Church in Oklahoma is certainly worse than any dry-goods catalog.

While looking for ways to curb my junk mail I ran across Ecofuture.com which has an interesting page discussing reasons to use a temporary change of address form rather than a permanent form.

Some ugly facts about junk mail: The average American receives 41 pounds of junk mail each year.  Almost half –44%– of the junk mail ends up in a landfill. Almost $320 million in  tax money is used to dispose of junk mail, and more than 100 million trees a year are used to create pulpwood for paper products–that’s like deforesting the Rocky Mountain National Park every 4 months.