Reduce, reuse, recycle... KWB columns?

Looking through some of the Keep Wimberley Beautiful columns from 1995 on, so much of it is still relevant today.

The columns used to consist of three sections: “What’s Going On?” “How Does Your Garden Grow?” and “Environmental Earthkeeping.” We have chosen to recycle (which is one of KWB’s missions) one of these sections for our column this week. Here is the “What’s Going On?” section of the KWB column, written by Martha Knies and Dawn Teague from the July 5, 1997 edition of The Wimberley View.

“Eleven members of KWB have just returned from the state convention of Keep Texas Beautiful in San Antonio. One of the workshops attended by Gerin Hood stressed the importance of source reduction … that is, limiting the packaging and excess from products before they ever get to our homes. This particular type of conservation, by the way, can save more resources and energy than any kind of recycling or reuse program.

Gerin stated that she and her husband, Dell, have practiced source reduction quite successfully by refusing junk mail. When they receive unsolicited mail, they tear out the return mailing card and write a note on it canceling the delivery and asking that their names be removed from the sender’s mailing list. They stick this note on it and return to the sender. By law, companies must remove their names.

Since they have practiced this routine regularly, their junk mail has been almost totally eliminated. TRY IT!”

Back to 2023. We spoke to Hood about this, and she said that most magazines and catalogs no longer have the stamped return mailing card. She told us about catalogchoice.org, a nonprofit service that has a long list of catalogs from which you can choose to opt out. They will see that you are taken off the mailing list for those catalogs. You must use the exact name and address that are on the catalogs you receive for this to work. Their website tells you how many hundreds of thousands of trees, how many billions of tons of greenhouse gasses, how many millions of pounds of solid waste and how many billions of gallons of water their program has saved. The numbers are shocking.

You can be a part of the solution by reducing the amount of junk mail that is produced and sent to you. Like Gerin said, “TRY IT!”