I used to do product development for a large mail order company. Part of my job was to get my name on every available mailing list so I could keep up with what was going on in the marketplace. And I kept up. With hundreds of flyers, catalogs, and other various junk jamming my mailbox every week.

That was acceptable then, but it isn't now. My mailbox is almost as jammed as it was back in the day, and I toss about 80% of what lands there. While I'm not a flannel-shirt-and-sandal-wearing tree hugger, I do care about the tremendous waste generated by all this. So I signed up for GreenDimes.

For $36 per year ("a dime-a-day"), GreenDimes will stem the tide of unwanted junk mail (about 75-90% of it), by contacting the publishers on your behalf, removing you from their mailing lists. You can also tell them which specific catalogs and mailings you want to stop, so you don't lose ones you want to continue getting.

Wonderful. But I can do this on my own. Why pay some company - which is a for-profit company, at that - to do it for me? Three reasons. Reason one: I don't have the time to find all the contact info for all the junk mail bozos and write to them. The hours that would take are worth way more than $36. Reason two: The trees. GreenDimes plants one tree every month on behalf of each member. That's twelve trees a year replaced for my daily dime alone. And reason three: The kids. GreenDimes gives $2 from every new membership to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to purchase a Child ID kit. And I'm all about the kids.

So how much of an environmental impact does all this have? GreenDimes says every year 100 million trees and 28 billion gallons of water are used to produce unwanted junk mail. Since their launch in September of last year, they've stopped almost 900,000 pounds of junk mail, saved or planted over 220,000 trees and saved over 2.2 million gallons of water. Not bad for a dime.

$36 per year
www.greendimes.com