Many months ago, Charlie had mentioned on his blog that he’d love to stop receiving all junk mail. That got me thinking – there is the Do Not Call registry, why the heck isn’t there a Do Not Mail registry? Junk mail sucks up a lot of time too! Then a few weeks later, I found Green Dimes which promises to shield you from all junk mail. I wasn’t too sure if it would actually work, so I held off on signing up.

But after my friends Om and Micheal each did a post on it, I decided to try it out.

I’m a rabid recycler – I will spend ten minutes ripping the plastic and random other doodads off cardboard in order to recycle it. So saving trees is a huge motivational factor. Green Dimes says for $36 a year, they will unsubscribe me from junk mail. In addition for $3 a year, I can add another name to the removal list. Lucky for me, they are running a promotional special and I added on R for just an extra dollar. So, for $37, in about 3 months, I should be junk-mail-free! In addition to saving tonnes of paper, it will, hopefully, save me the time and the pain of having to shred, toss everything into the recycling bin and drag the huge bag of paper down every week.

I can’t wait. I am still a little fuzzy on what happens with catalogs – they tell me not to unsubscribe from catalogs that I don’t get because the evil catalog companies will then add my name to the list (yes! instead of unsubscribing you, they say “a-ha, a name we didn’t know” and subscribe you!) So, I wrote to them. The answer, which I got back in about 10 minutes, was disappointing. There is no catch-all for catalogs. I will have to get the catalogs, go to the Green Dimes site and unsubscribe. I guess that is better than having to call the companies, but I hope they can come up with a better idea for dealing with this.

A couple of months ago, I called my credit card companies and asked them to not send me *any* solicitations whatsoever. AmEx is the worst offender in this regard. And last year, I switched everything to paperless statements. So, I am on my way.

And now with Green Dimes, I hope to be almost fully paperless. Green Dimes will even plant a tree for me every month. I could even pick which part of the world to put my tree – I decided that I would keep my tree planting equally divided across North America, Central & South America, India, Africa and Haiti.

Let’s hope Green Dimes really works. Saving our planet while also saving time – what could be better? I will be sure to report back on progress!