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!

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?

Stop Junk Mail's petition for an easy and effective system for opting out of junk mail has now closed. The petition got exactly 250 signatures; not as much as I'd hoped but not a bad result either.

I'd like to thank everyone who took the effort to sign the petition. If you did, you should receive a response to the petition from the Government (by e-mail) some time soon.

I was on MacAulay and Co (BBC Radio Scotland) this morning. You can listen back [ Link removed as the programme is no longer available - JB ] to the programme for a week (until Monday 17 March 2008).

Sadly, BBC Action Network is closing. In the short time Stop Junk Mail was part of the network I found it quite useful, but the BBC feels that times have moved on and that Action Network can't compete with the likes of Blogger, Facebook and Friction.tv. The Action Network website will be closing on 30 April 2008 (Queens Day in the Netherlands!), so you can still visit us there [ Link removed as Action Network has now been closed - JB ] for another seven weeks.

So far I haven't used Blogger [ Note this blog is no longer hosted by Blogger either - JB ] to get in contact with people who have an opinion about junk mail. I've for instance never allowed readers of this blog to leave a comment. I've decided to change that; from now on you can talk back.