This Is My Catalog Choice

I’m not sure how this is possible, but one pass through of my house this weekend (during our frenzied cleaning) produced nearly nine pounds of catalogs. Or a pile that’s about the size of two big phone books–you know, the kind that your grandparents might have used as stand-in booster seats when you were young? I’m talking the big and thick phone books. I haven’t done a magazine and catalog purge for a few weeks, so seeing all of these catalogs in one place really drives home how much catalog mail we’re receiving.

I know that catalogs are recyclable, but the truth is, to be green, you need to pay attention to the order of the three Rs.

The first is REDUCE.

Then it’s REUSE.

And then it’s RECYCLE.

Ideally, we all should be reducing the amount of stuff that we buy and bring into our homes. Knowing that I have this easy option of reducing the number of catalogs I receive by registering my preferences with Catalog Choice, well that’s a step in the right direction.

Let me explain how Catalog Choice works, how it worked for me and how it can work for you.

First, you need to collect all of the catalogs in your home, because you’re going to need the customer numbers to make sure that your getting off of the mailing list “sticks.” And the only place to find those customer numbers is on the back of the catalogs themselves.

Then, you’re ready to being using your computer. Click over to Catalog Choice.org and from the home page choose the “Get Started” button. From there you need to set up an account, which will only take a few minutes, and then click the “Sign Up” button.

(Note: the website neglects to tell you that before you can successfully start “declining” catalogs, you have to accept the registration email that they send to you as soon as you finish signing up. So after you’ve finished with the sign-up page, make sure you toggle over to your email account and click on that confirmation link in your email. Unfortunately, when you do click on that link, it doesn’t bring you back to the page where you just were but an entirely new window. I’m not entirely convinced that going back to the previous window gets you to a page with the right cookies, so I’m starting fresh from the new window that clicking on the registration-confirmation link brought me to–and I would recommend you do the same.)

On the next page you come to, there will be options on the left hand side of the screen from which to choose. Select “Find Catalogs.”

Once you get to this page, you’ll see a search window with two tabs. You can “search” for your catalog by name. Or you can “browse” the list of catalog companies currently working with Catalog Choice (not all companies are).

I decided to “search” and plugged in the name of the first catalog in my pile, Uncommon Goods. (Love their stuff and will continue to shop with them online. But I just don’t need their paper catalog, which just ends up in the recycling bin.) And after clicking on “Search,” Uncommon Goods came up with a button next to it that says “Decline.” I clicked on it.

Clicking on “decline” brought me to a page where I needed to plug in my customer number. (All your other information appears automatically from when you registered.) I found my customer number of Uncommon Goods directly above my name on the mailing label. I typed it in, clicked on “Decline Catalog,” and I got a confirmation page saying that this catalog was successfully declined. All told this took me about two to three minutes.

I’ve got 28 more catalogs to get through, but this means that when I’m done, I’ll have 28 fewer catalogs coming into my house each month. Multiply that by 12 months and, well, it’s easy to see what an impact you can have on reducing your paper output if you just opt-out of these catalogs. Again, I’m not saying that you can’t continue to shop with your favorite retailers, but use the website instead and save a couple of trees by avoiding the printed catalog all together