Today I got nearly 30 kilos of junk mail from a local resident here in Norwich. The building she lives in is divided up into ten flats and has one front door. Most leafleters simply push ten pieces of junk mail through the letter box, apparently in the expectation that the residents will eagerly collect their own bit of junk. They don't, of course, and as a result the hallway of the beautiful building had turned into a complete dump.

Some of the junk mail will go back to where it came from, but most of it will be used to decorate my stall on the Green Day at the Norfolk & Norwich University Hospital on Tuesday 3 June 2008.

All the junk mail on the photos is unaddressed stuff; a bin bag with addressed junk mail is to arrive at the Stop Junk Mail head quarters tomorrow… The house the junk mail was collected from now has a 'No/No' sticker on the letter box and I've given the residents a card to opt out of unaddressed items delivered by Royal Mail - as per usual, the postman turned out to be the worst junk mailer!

It seems almost every week a new junk mail study is published. Without exception these studies are commissioned by bulk mailers and they always have the same outcome: people feel negatively about junk mail, but they do read it. And, although they might realise it, they actually enjoy doing so.

The latest study was published this week by An Post, the Irish Post Office. An Post paid consultancy agency Amarach to conduct the research. What's interesting about this study is not the outcome, but what the head of Amarach told the Irish Independent about the research: I've never met anyone who likes direct mail, but then nobody likes advertising either.

In this rather frank statement lies the answer to the question why junk mail research is always so upbeat. What's being studied isn't how people really feel about junk mail - we already know the answer to that one. Instead, researchers only look at certain aspects of behavior in relation to junk mail. By doing so they can manipulate the outcome of the study.

To give an example, one of the questions respondents had to answer was how they prefer companies to communicate with them. There are two problems with a question like this. First of all, communication suggests that there's interaction. That, of course, is hardly the case when it comes to unsolicited advertisements, and one would suspect that the reason why the researchers use the word communicate is because respondents are unlikely to associate it with sending junk mail.

More importantly, the respondents were obviously not given the option to say that they prefer not to receive 'unsolicited communications' at all. In other words, the question presumes that they want to receive junk mail. And so, unsurprisingly, one of the outcomes of An Post's study was that 70 per cent of people prefer companies to communicate with them by post rather than by internet or telephone.

To be fair, it are not only bulk mailers that use spin. The Say not to phone books campaign, for example, has done some rather informal research suggesting that 80 per cent of Britons never uses a paper telephone directory and would support a central opt-out system for directories. They don't claim their research is any way scientific, but it does create a similar false impression.

Junk studies like this are completely useless and it is a shame that research like this is so abundant. It would be interesting to have some real research into attitudes towards junk mail, conducted by someone interested in facts rather than outcomes. Any students out there looking for an idea for a dissertation?

Online directory 192.com has started a campaign for a central opt-out system for telephone books, similar to the Mailing Preference Service. The company has calculated that every year 75 million telephone directories are delivered to British households and businesses (a figure that includes the BT Phone Book as well as the Yellow Pages and Thomson Local directory). Apparently, the out-dated environmental menace that is the phone book is equivalent to a 75,000 tonne mountain of waste. No wonder they want their competitors to stop producing so many phone books…

Anyone who sympathises can sign the 'Say no to phone books' e-petition [ Link removed as the petition has now closed - JB ]. At the same time you can opt out of receiving paper directories.

New consumer protection laws have come into force today. The Consumer Protection Regulations ban 31 types of unfair sales practices and closes loopholes that rogue traders have so far been able to exploit by establishing a catch-all duty not to trade unfairly.

The regulations are bad news for fortune-tellers, astrologists and other mediums, who opposed the new laws because they now have to tell the people they target that they are offering 'entertainment only' and that their work is not 'experimentally proven'. However, it's no doubt good news for the 170,000 people who fall victim to clairvoyant / psychic mailing scams every year.

And it are not only clairvoyants who will be heading to Jobcentre Plus. The regulations also ban practices such as establishing, operating or promoting a pyramid selling scheme, describing a product as 'free' when it is not, and creating the false impression that someone will win a prize when there is no prize. No formal objections were received from these corners…

Many more practices are now a criminal offence. It might not be the end of fake lotteries, work from home scams, miracle health cures and the likes, but it does give the Office of Fair Trading and Trading Standards the tools to prosecute more scam artists.

More information about scams is available on the website.

Stop Junk Mail is not in any way against advertising mail. Businesses need to advertise, charities need to raise money, and Royal Mail needs to deliver something. If you love credit card offers, take-away menus, and want to keep up to date with what's on offer in the supermarket you can have as much of the stuff as you want. What Stop Junk Mail does have a problem with is that it's quite a task not to receive unsolicited offers if you're not interested in them. With this in mind I wrote this article for mycustomer.com.

The point I tried to make is that there's in fact common ground between people concerned about the amount of waste produced by junk mail and marketeers wanting to go green. The simple solution is to make it truly easy for people to opt out of unsolicited mail they do not wish to receive.

Any marketeer will acknowledge that there's no point in delivering advertisements to people who are not interested. It's pure waste. Making it easy for people to stop what they percieve as 'junk mail' would mean that marketeers can target mailings much more economically. Yet, in the current debate about how the marketing industry can reduce waste this suggestion isn't even on the table. Instead, the emphasis is on increasing recycling rates and improving 'targeting' by collecting ever more personal details.

Making sure that more junk mail is recycled is of course important. However, much more could be achieved by introducing an easy and effective opt out system. Take, for example, Royal Mail's Door-to-Door Opt-Out. Roughly one in four unaddressed leaflets is delivered by Royal Mail. Yet, less than 0.5 per cent of households are currently signed up to the opt-out scheme. Would anyone argue that this is because leaflets delivered by the postman are in such great demand and that it would be impossible to increase the number of households opted out to, say, 20 per cent?