Open the hatch of your post office box. If you are like most Telluriders, you will find some bills, maybe a card from your mother or a magazine you subscribe to. But mostly, it’s a tangle of junk — catalogues, solicitations for credit cards you aren’t interested in, coupons from stores you don’t go to.

This week, a coalition of local organizations and governments is hosting an educational campaign at the Telluride Post Office aimed at helping people shrink the river of junk mail that floods their boxes.

A Junk the Junk Mail table will be set up each day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the post office, manned by volunteers who are there to make extraction from mailing lists a little easier.

“This is just what we thought we could do to help in our own little way,” said Stephanie Warner, who works for the town and came up with the idea. “There’s nothing worse than getting four catalogues from somewhere you’ve never even shopped at.”

An hour into the process, on Monday morning, 10 people had already jumped on. By noon, 25 people had signed on to reduce their junk mail.

The process was pretty easy. People filled out a form with their name and e-mail address and a list of catalogues from which they want to unsubscribe.

When the week’s over, volunteers will take the forms and go to www.cataloguechoice.com, where they will do the work of entering the information and making the requests.

Volunteer Kelly O’Laughlin was also handing people homemade cookies and flyers with lists of Web sites that will aid people with removing their names from lists held by credit card companies and others.

“It takes a little bit of time, but if you commit to it once, it usually helps a lot,” she told a handful of people.

Polly Lychee does a good bit of shopping by catalogue, she said, and then ends up with a stack of catalogues in her box. So on Monday, she signed up to whittle down her catalogue mail.

“I get too many of the catalogues and I know it’s a waste of materials,” she said. “I’m glad they’re here. This is really helpful.”

Warner said she decided to reduce her own junk mail while thinking about what little things she could do to shrink her impact. After finding the chore easy and satisfying, she started sharing the idea with others. The junk mail campaign was born one day during such a discussion with Sheep Mountain Alliance’s Dave Allen. Eliza Keating from the New Community Coalition jumped aboard, and what followed was a rash of support and enthusiasm.

“It was just one of those things that came so naturally because it’s such a hot topic in Telluride,” Allen said.

Because while junk mail is, on its face, a nuisance, it’s also something that comes with hefty environmental and monetary impacts, Allen said.

Some tidbits offered by the campaign include:

• The disposal and production of junk mail generates more carbon emissions than 2.8 million cars.

• More than 1 million trees are destroyed each year to produce junk mail.

• People spend about 70 hours a year dealing with junk mail.

• About 28 billion gallons of water are used to produce and recycle junk mail each year.

Keating said the junk mail campaign is designed to do more than serve as a one-time affair. It aims to spark awareness about what people can do over the long term, which will entail more than just filling out a form once at the post office, she said.

“It takes personal action,” Keating said. “It takes people realizing that they receive mail because they are consumers … With junk mail, it requires constant vigilance.”

Keating suggested that people devote a half day each spring and another in the fall to getting themselves blotted off mailing lists.

Allen echoed.

“The reality is, it’s really up to each person individually to remove their names,” he said.
“It’s really an education event more than anything.”

The event is still in need of volunteers. Anyone who wants to help out should drop by the post office between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., where there is a sign-up sheet, or call Eliza at 728-1340.

Keating wanted to thank all those who have helped, especially the staff at the post office, who have been supportive, and who have recently added more recycling bins to the facility.