Both myself and my wife think that is a great idea about giving them fair warning and then charging them a disposal charge.

We are tring to reduce the amount of paper we recieve, partially from an enviromental view but there is so much of it that we recieve that a whole bin bag of shredded paper is produced every month and I have to deal with it all, especially as our council refuses to take shredded paper in the recycling bin and so it has to go to the local dump.

Even return to sender doesn't work, I think the marketing departments seem to have this notion that bombarding me with mail makes me more likely to take their products up, when it is the reverse.

In reply to a post by undecidedadrian:

Even return to sender doesn't work

It does solve the monthly disposal problem if you happen to go past a post box.

Really you shouldn't be recieving ex-customer emails after that length of time. I know that Sky have a 12 month policy. From then you're treated as a new customer.

An ex-flatmate had a far more therapeutic freepost abuse method than bricks, simply "cross breeding" the junk mail. I.e. if VM and Sky are both sending you junk you send VM the Sky junk and vice versa, with a nice little post-it-note saying "I thought this might be of interest to you. It isn't? I'm sorry, stop sending me stuff I don't want and I'll stop sending it to you"

Edited by deleted (Tue 22-Feb-11 16:02:07)

That only works if pre-paid envelopes are included. The VM and Sky bumpf that we get doesn't have pre-paid envelopes.

Sounds like what AOL used to do by bombarding people with disks.

You could always fill up your local post box with it (the non addressed leafllets of course), the local posties might get so fed up of clearing it out that they'll just dump the VM stuff.

Well VM are still continuing to sending me this stuff and it taking more and more of my time up just wading through all the junk getting it disposed or returned to sender that I am sending them a letter to their legal department.

Letter reads:

I have contacted your company on several occasions over the years to stop receiving addressed marketing to the above address.

Initially my name was removed and replaced with �The Occupier� I assume it was done so you could continue sending this unwanted material and still stay within the data protection act.

I once again contacted your company on the 12th February 2011 and was told it could take up to 4 weeks to have this address removed from your data bases.

Today I have yet again received unwanted marketing material more than 4 weeks after I asked for this to be stopped.

Therefore I am now giving you notice in writing that after the 1st April 2011 that any more such communications from your company shall be subject to a £10 handling fee for their disposal. This fee is for my time and materials used in the disposal of the said marketing materials.

If you continue sending marketing materials to the above address you will have deemed to have agree to these conditions.



Lets see if a couple of invoices hitting them changes their mind, probably won't but lets see if I can get a couple of CCJ's against them.

I honestly don't know whether to admire you or suggest that you need to be sectioned

I really can't criticise because I too can get wound up over things that are frankly pretty trivial. I well remember my wife telling me that burning down the local pizza parlour with 4 sacks full of their damned menus which they delivered daily was going too far. At least it stopped the menus though...

I am not a rabid enviromentalist but I do try and reduce my consumption wherever possible,

The problem is that I used to work for an enviromental testing laboratory and glossy flyers like VM send out have a huge amount of waste associated with them, I know I saw the figures day in day out.

Not just with the paper being made but the inks used have a large amount of heavy metals in them and a printing works will discharge a lot of waste ink and the heavy metals all go into the sewers and given how often VM mail me it turns into a small enviromental disater.

Scale up how many they must be sending out and the impact to the enviroment is huge.

I suppose if I suggest an enviromental levy on fliyers to the government do you think they would take the idea on.

In reply to a post by undecidedadrian:

I am not a rabid enviromentalist but I do try and reduce my consumption wherever possible,

The problem is that I used to work for an enviromental testing laboratory and glossy flyers like VM send out have a huge amount of waste associated with them, I know I saw the figures day in day out.

Not just with the paper being made but the inks used have a large amount of heavy metals in them and a printing works will discharge a lot of waste ink and the heavy metals all go into the sewers and given how often VM mail me it turns into a small enviromental disater.

Scale up how many they must be sending out and the impact to the enviroment is huge.

I suppose if I suggest an enviromental levy on fliyers to the government do you think they would take the idea on.

I agree.

I get flyers through my door daily from all sorts of companies, the most common is local takeaways, I think I have had 3 dominoes menus in the past week as an example. The waste must be horrific for all this junk mail.