Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
Speaker 1: from house Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to
Speaker 1: the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and I'm sorry I was
Speaker 1: going to do the thing. And I'm Chuff Bryant and
Speaker 1: this is stuff you should know that was totally off
Speaker 1: the cup that I think we should say. I think
Speaker 1: it's been chuck. You ever been to Austin, Texas? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I love Austin. I've heard nothing but good things. Keep
Speaker 1: Austin weird and all. I've never been very but I
Speaker 1: do know that if you go to Austin, Texas right now,
Speaker 1: and you go to MLK Boulevard near the corner of
Speaker 1: Alexander Avenue, you're gonna find a little gallery and it
Speaker 1: is called the Flatbed Press Art Gallery. Interesting. And if
Speaker 1: you go into there, like I said, right now, you're
Speaker 1: going to find a piece of art in art installation.
Speaker 1: It's called free paper. Have you heard of this? Yes?
Speaker 1: Because you told me, Well, I'll tell everybody else. The
Speaker 1: uh There's a woman named a Net Lawrence and she's
Speaker 1: a Texas artist, right and basically what she did was.
Speaker 1: She saved UM a year's worth of junk mail and
Speaker 1: it came to total two sixty five pounds by the way,
Speaker 1: just junk mail. And she tore it into two inch
Speaker 1: strips and then basically installed it. UM put it together
Speaker 1: in stacks by month, and then UM put it on shelves.
Speaker 1: So there's twelve little separate it's almost like a cross
Speaker 1: section of junk mail. And the way she did it,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have thought to do it this way, but
Speaker 1: it really gets the point across with minimal space. It's
Speaker 1: quite beautiful until you think about you know, it's junk mail.
Speaker 1: So I and as I understand, she's not the only
Speaker 1: junk male artist that's going on right now, surprising, there's
Speaker 1: a bunch. And I have another one here and her
Speaker 1: name is Barbara Hashimoto, an American artist and she works
Speaker 1: with junk male. She does provocative like art installations, interactive
Speaker 1: type of thing. She's a provocateur. And what she's done
Speaker 1: and this is generally like most junk male artists are
Speaker 1: probably making a political statement and an environmental statement, and
Speaker 1: that's what she's doing. And she is in Chicago and
Speaker 1: she set aside the junk mail from her business for
Speaker 1: a year, so it was quite a bit more, obviously
Speaker 1: than a person would get, and she ended up with
Speaker 1: three thousand cubic feet of Then she shredded it, actually
Speaker 1: with a paper shredder. She had one called junk mail
Speaker 1: with grand piano. And what she would do is she
Speaker 1: got this piano player with a grand piano and put
Speaker 1: him in a in a in a room facing a
Speaker 1: street with you know, glass that people could see and obviously,
Speaker 1: and he would start playing this symphony some you know,
Speaker 1: not symphony, but some you know, nice piano music. Sound
Speaker 1: like it's such a lunkhead there. I'm a musician too.
Speaker 1: And so he's playing the piano and she starts dumping this, uh,
Speaker 1: the shredded junk mail on him and on the piano
Speaker 1: as he's doing it. And basically it's a process. And
Speaker 1: at the end of it, this guy can't even be
Speaker 1: heard anymore. He's completely cut or the pianos completely covered,
Speaker 1: and you hear just these little muffled, hammered sounds of
Speaker 1: the piano string and it's the point across that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's pretty cool. Okay, So for the rest of us
Speaker 1: who have neither the time nor the inclination to play
Speaker 1: with junk mail, right and make statements with junk mail.
Speaker 1: I should say, um, you know, obviously it's it's annoying.
Speaker 1: I shouldn't even say that, it's just so blatantly obvious.
Speaker 1: But it's also kind of harmful. Junk male is harmful
Speaker 1: extremely Um. Number One, you can very easily become the
Speaker 1: victim of identity fraud just from preapproved credit card applications. UM.
Speaker 1: I think there's uh something like four hundred thousand cases
Speaker 1: of identity theft every year, um that are attributed just
Speaker 1: to pre approved credit cards. Interesting, that's as sig Kirshner's
Speaker 1: by the way, that's his figure. He's a CONSUMERU. That's good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So um, that's that's a problem right there. And well,
Speaker 1: you know, people, my wife is a master shredder. She
Speaker 1: is on top of our household as far as the
Speaker 1: mail and the bills, and she shreds everything like that.
Speaker 1: She shreds things that I mean like stupid, you don't
Speaker 1: need to shred my sports illustrated re up thing, and
Speaker 1: she will. And coincidentally, we've never had our identity soul.
Speaker 1: And so people that just toss that, people that just
Speaker 1: toss that into the trash. It's ruthly not very smart.
Speaker 1: No it's not. I usually burn mine. That's good, just
Speaker 1: had a spite. Well, I don't have a shredder. I
Speaker 1: don't want to just toss it in the trance either,
Speaker 1: so you heat your home with it, or sometimes this
Speaker 1: is kind of weird, but sometimes I will um take
Speaker 1: the most sensitive parts of it and tear it off
Speaker 1: and then eat it. Really yeah, yeah, no going through
Speaker 1: that trash pal Well, that actually what she said before
Speaker 1: about burning it leads me to an interesting stat that
Speaker 1: I've just flown in from the home office. Two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand homes can actually be heated from a
Speaker 1: single day's worth of junk male in the United States
Speaker 1: by burning it. That would be awful. Not a single household, obviously,
Speaker 1: it's all the junk mail in the country, right So
Speaker 1: but I'm saying I don't think we should be setting
Speaker 1: this on fire right well now, it's just to kind
Speaker 1: of drive the point on the four million tons a
Speaker 1: year in the United States alone. And a final stat, Josh,
Speaker 1: if you're interested, forty four and this is a really
Speaker 1: sad one of all junk mail goes unopened and is
Speaker 1: put into a landfill eventually. Yes, and Chuck, I have
Speaker 1: another stat for you. This is our stat Heavy Junk
Speaker 1: Mail Podcast special. Um, did you know that with the
Speaker 1: amount of paper that's thrown out by Americans every year? Um,
Speaker 1: you're junk mail and just paper. Well, junk mail is
Speaker 1: part of it. That's include junk mail. This is just paper.
Speaker 1: But it's gonna leave me back around at a second,
Speaker 1: so so bear with me. Um, you could build a
Speaker 1: twelve ft tall wall from New York to Los Angeles. Really,
Speaker 1: that's annually. They should build that wall. Think about how
Speaker 1: how incredibly thin paper is. You can make it twelve
Speaker 1: feet tall and all the way from New York to
Speaker 1: l A How thick? Yeah, okay, it would be much
Speaker 1: of a wall. No, no, no, I mean like you're
Speaker 1: laying a piece of paper flat on the ground and
Speaker 1: stacking them up until so it would be what eight
Speaker 1: and a half inches? Why, I thought you were taping
Speaker 1: it all together so it would be would be stupid. Well,
Speaker 1: this is the Clean Air Counsel. I would like to
Speaker 1: think that they wouldn't toy with me like that. But
Speaker 1: you know, as always, as Mark Twain said, there are
Speaker 1: three kinds of lies. Lies, damn lies and statistics. You
Speaker 1: should always take statistics with a grain of salt. But
Speaker 1: how about this. Clearly there's a ton of junk mail
Speaker 1: that's wasted every year. Can we bring on that or
Speaker 1: a million tons? Yes, that is a statistic. Two Okay, So, um,
Speaker 1: you've got credit card fraud, you've got waste. But not
Speaker 1: just um waste. It's also input. You have to consider
Speaker 1: the input. It takes a tremendous amount of water actually
Speaker 1: to make paper, um, which is kind of odd because
Speaker 1: papers dry, But to separate the fibers and make this
Speaker 1: in a pulp, they add tons of water. There's actually
Speaker 1: a process where they first they washed wood off right
Speaker 1: at all any impurities. They send it into a steamer
Speaker 1: for four hours. Then they chop it up and turns
Speaker 1: into a pulp, and then they add water to the
Speaker 1: aratio of about two hundred to one two hundred parts
Speaker 1: water to one part pulp. Yeah, and then they dry
Speaker 1: it out. Right. Were you laughing in my amazement? No,
Speaker 1: it's like I was laughing at the this this astronomical
Speaker 1: use of water to make paper, right, so um, and
Speaker 1: then they dry it out. Um. And when they're drying
Speaker 1: it out, they're actually using um steam heated rollers. So
Speaker 1: there's more water right there. And then there's another part
Speaker 1: to the the end before they do the final dry
Speaker 1: where they add more water and then dry it out
Speaker 1: to make it slick and glossy. Yes, so that's a
Speaker 1: lot of water. Of course, a lot of trees are
Speaker 1: are are used specifically for paper about a hundred million
Speaker 1: a year, is that right, that's what the University of
Speaker 1: Oregon says. If I'm not mistaken, that's a lot of trees.
Speaker 1: It is a lot of trees, and it's kind of
Speaker 1: sad to think about it, but there's many are grown
Speaker 1: specifically to become paper. Right. Yes, I must say that
Speaker 1: paper mills do reuse water just for cost effectiveness. Um,
Speaker 1: so they are reusing water. But still there's twenty eight
Speaker 1: billion gallons of water used annually to produce paper. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's input, So you know that's if they're reusing it,
Speaker 1: they're still using a lot of water. And I hate
Speaker 1: to use the I don't mean to be inclusive and
Speaker 1: exclusive and in group and out group like the paper
Speaker 1: industry is just the evil you know, tobacco industries, which
Speaker 1: God knows they're evil, but um, you're holding paper right now,
Speaker 1: I am holy paper. I use paper, but I recycle
Speaker 1: all paper like you. You know, we have that single
Speaker 1: stream recycling thing where all the waste baskets at the
Speaker 1: desks are basically recycling. I never throw anything away in there,
Speaker 1: the only paper. Yeah, I practice what I preach. Friend,
Speaker 1: I'm not calling you to death. But all right, that's fine.
Speaker 1: I can settle down because my fight or flight response
Speaker 1: is just pumping. Okay, so chuck. It's a waste, right,
Speaker 1: It's annoying, it's potentially threatening as far as finances go.
Speaker 1: With identity threat, what can an individual do to fight
Speaker 1: the good fight against direct mail? Well, which, by the way,
Speaker 1: I can give you one more figure. This is a figure,
Speaker 1: not a status, so it's much more reliable. First of all,
Speaker 1: did you even know that there's such a thing as
Speaker 1: um direct mail pharmaceuticals? No, get pills through the mail.
Speaker 1: Now you can get pills through the mail, yes, but
Speaker 1: this is like advertising direct mail advertising for pharmaceuticals. I
Speaker 1: have never gotten one. I don't know. It's probably because
Speaker 1: I don't have a primary physician. But the direct male
Speaker 1: pharmaceutical market alone in two thousand and eight racked up
Speaker 1: ten points x billion in sales based specifically on direct mail.
Speaker 1: Their return on investment for one dollar was ten dollars
Speaker 1: twenty seven cents. Every dollar they spent on direct mail
Speaker 1: advertising rate them in ten dollars and twenty seven cents
Speaker 1: in two eight. That's just one sector. Well, we're in
Speaker 1: the wrong business totally. I've always said we need to
Speaker 1: start making our own pharmaceutics. Never looking is just not paying.
Speaker 1: We're not making ten billion, I'll tell you that. And no,
Speaker 1: we're not or anything actually, So what can be done.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna leave the second part to you about the
Speaker 1: official websites and things. I thought you left the first
Speaker 1: part to me. I'm gonna go with the first part.
Speaker 1: One thing you can do is you can actually send
Speaker 1: it back. Uh. This is not about stopping it from
Speaker 1: coming to your home, but instead of being angry and
Speaker 1: just burning it or whatever you do, shooting it with
Speaker 1: your eating it with your gun, eating it and processing
Speaker 1: it through your own miserable body, some ink is better
Speaker 1: than others. I can tell you. I bet you can
Speaker 1: actually send it back. Um. Junk mail is usually first
Speaker 1: class or third class, which is called bulk rate. And uh,
Speaker 1: if you if your envelope is stamped, address correction requested
Speaker 1: or return postage guaranteed. You can return it unopened to
Speaker 1: the sender by writing refused return to center on the envelope.
Speaker 1: Stick it back in your mailbox, and flip up your
Speaker 1: little flag. Oh flag, I didn't think you're just a flag. Yes,
Speaker 1: flip up your flag. But you can only do this
Speaker 1: on bulk mail with that special notification on it. Um.
Speaker 1: If you have a solicitation solicitation sorry that has postage
Speaker 1: paid reply envelope, then just put a note saying that
Speaker 1: you want to be removed from the mailing list and
Speaker 1: include that mailing label and or write refused on it
Speaker 1: and you might actually get taken off that list. So
Speaker 1: that's one way to do it. Well, thanks to our
Speaker 1: friend the Internet, it's gotten a lot easier to stop
Speaker 1: getting junk mail ryes um. There are actual sites that
Speaker 1: are dedicated to you not getting junk mail. And remember
Speaker 1: they do not call registry right. Well, there's been several
Speaker 1: attempts to create a you know, do not mail registry
Speaker 1: basically UM, and it hasn't taken off. It may in
Speaker 1: the future, who knows, but as it as it stands
Speaker 1: for now, it's up to the individual to take care
Speaker 1: of their own junk mail stream right um, And like
Speaker 1: I said, the Internet is a great tool for that.
Speaker 1: They're like, uh, opt out prescreen dot com is one
Speaker 1: place you can go. And basically the reason we have
Speaker 1: junk males because your name and address in personal information
Speaker 1: is actually valuable. It's valuable on its own in a
Speaker 1: very small amount fractions and fractions of assent as a
Speaker 1: single individual. Well when you put it together with thousands
Speaker 1: and tens and thousands and hundreds of thousands of other
Speaker 1: people millions, millions, I'll go with millions, um, then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden that list as a whole becomes valuable.
Speaker 1: So people who have your information or millions of people's
Speaker 1: information can put these things together and make some extra
Speaker 1: scratch on the side by selling it to direct marketers.
Speaker 1: And one group that aggregates these this information are credit
Speaker 1: reporting bureaus. They are allowed by law to give out
Speaker 1: certain personal information about you, like name, address, preferences to
Speaker 1: some stuff that you've provided, to sell it for their
Speaker 1: own behalf. You get absolutely nothing for it and they
Speaker 1: make money off of it. Yeah, and what you get
Speaker 1: in the end, it's junk mail. So the opt out
Speaker 1: prescreen dot com website basically UH makes it so the
Speaker 1: the four major credit reporting bureaus can't sell your stuff
Speaker 1: any longer. Um. And it'll take a little wild to
Speaker 1: get off the lists, but you will eventually hopefully be purged.
Speaker 1: Um and that last for five years or I think
Speaker 1: you can also do a lifetime block right on selling.
Speaker 1: Why wouldn't you just do that would be great? I
Speaker 1: don't know, it doesn't make any sense. In five years,
Speaker 1: I might want to get this junk mail, so I'll
Speaker 1: just go with the five. Well, you know, actually there
Speaker 1: are there's this this group called the Direct Market Association
Speaker 1: UH and they may be um, the bane of most
Speaker 1: people's existence because they're actually a trade association of direct
Speaker 1: marketers right and UM. Luckily, they have a nice little
Speaker 1: website that you can access to get out, to opt out.
Speaker 1: It's called d m A consumers dot org and they
Speaker 1: have basically the same thing that you'll find an opt
Speaker 1: out pre screen. They have fifty member companies and it's
Speaker 1: not just for profit business. Nonprofits, political action groups are
Speaker 1: members of of the d m A. And when you
Speaker 1: get taken off the d m AS list, you get
Speaker 1: taken off of all these people's mailing lists. So that's
Speaker 1: another thing you can do. Um, there's steps you can take,
Speaker 1: or actually there's steps that you cannot take that can
Speaker 1: keep you off warranty cards. Warranty cards, Like think about this.
Speaker 1: When I researched this article, I hadn't thought about it
Speaker 1: at the time, and I thought back to, you know,
Speaker 1: when I filled out in a warranty card, because I
Speaker 1: must admit I am one of the suckers who actually
Speaker 1: has filled out a warranty card and melded in. Um,
Speaker 1: why the Queens and Art company who's blender I just purchased,
Speaker 1: would care whether my UM household would be most interested
Speaker 1: in hunting and fishing magazines or skydiving magazines, Like it
Speaker 1: didn't dawn any at the time, Like that's a little odd.
Speaker 1: And I think I even remember checking a box like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we're not really into hunting and fishing, but
Speaker 1: we're more into skydiving these days, so check, you know,
Speaker 1: And and then all of a sudden, like I got
Speaker 1: skydiving magazine. Come ons, you know there's a master card
Speaker 1: is sending me like a pre approved card with a
Speaker 1: skydiver d like we know you'll like this, sucker, and uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's bad. So never fell out a warranty
Speaker 1: card because you know we talked about extended warranties before
Speaker 1: you have your receipt. Warranty, that's your warranty. Because if
Speaker 1: they say you're you have a warranty, and you have
Speaker 1: the receipt, then you have the warranty. You don't need
Speaker 1: to fill out a card to ensure that you have
Speaker 1: the warranty. Exactly. It's just a big scam. It is
Speaker 1: a huge scam. You know those bits that sometimes you'll hear,
Speaker 1: like the morning radio shows do where they'll call like
Speaker 1: the head of the telemarketing company, you know, midnight and
Speaker 1: wake him up and say, how do you like it?
Speaker 1: You do you know your company and all that stuff.
Speaker 1: We should find out the person. There's one person, I'm
Speaker 1: sure where all the junk mail originates. Find out where
Speaker 1: this dude lives, and let's just go and like wallpaper
Speaker 1: his house with grocery store flyers. His name is Rusty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he would. Rusty would wake up and try to look
Speaker 1: out his window and all he would see is like
Speaker 1: ground beef dollar. He'd be like a piano player with
Speaker 1: a bunch of choke mail dumped on him right, and
Speaker 1: here is screams sorry, Rusty exactly you've probably saw on yourself, Rusty,
Speaker 1: Um the chuck. We're not quite done here. Okay, there's
Speaker 1: other there's actually businesses that you can subscribe to that
Speaker 1: will go to the trouble of getting you off list.
Speaker 1: I know our producer recommended one. Yeah. Um it's Green Dimes,
Speaker 1: I believe um. And basically our producer Jerry said that
Speaker 1: she there's a free service, um where you can just
Speaker 1: kind of I guess, do the basic job. But there's
Speaker 1: their twenty dollar annual membership fee. Actually, these people actively work.
Speaker 1: If they can't send something in on your behalf, like
Speaker 1: it needs your signature, maybe your Social Security number, which
Speaker 1: you will be asked for once in a while. This
Speaker 1: is not you being lured into an even bigger scam, um,
Speaker 1: but they need it for verification. I'm not certain that
Speaker 1: they need it, but they require it for verification. So
Speaker 1: if Green Dimes can't just do it as a third
Speaker 1: party telling somebody else to back off, they send you
Speaker 1: all the stuff that you like, these form letters, but
Speaker 1: you sign mailing back to them and Green Dime mails
Speaker 1: it for you, and then they monitor and by the way,
Speaker 1: I don't own any stock in Green Dimes or anything.
Speaker 1: I'm just kind of taken by this company. They may
Speaker 1: not be publicly traded anyway. They well, my dad didn't
Speaker 1: found it, if that's what you mean. Um. They they
Speaker 1: monitor all these lists um mailing lists every every month
Speaker 1: on a monthly basis to make sure your names stays
Speaker 1: off and if not, they go after the people. But
Speaker 1: just we're twenty bucks a year if you ask, and
Speaker 1: they plant five trees when you join. Really, well, there
Speaker 1: you have it. Four bucks a tree. Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 1: Sure it dip it. Well, it depends on the tree. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. I'm gonna sign up for that. I didn't
Speaker 1: know about that. And and remember never fell out a
Speaker 1: warranty card. Don't You Never respond to a publisher's clearing
Speaker 1: house sweep steaks one thing? What does it say on
Speaker 1: that you may have already won, But a lot of
Speaker 1: times it's name in your name. It'll just say yeah.
Speaker 1: If you respond to that, you will end up on
Speaker 1: what's called a sucker list. And and and that's actually
Speaker 1: what it's called in the industry, because you have shown
Speaker 1: that you were gullible and your junk mail will increase
Speaker 1: tremendously and your name pops up on the sucker list,
Speaker 1: and that's when all these companies go, oh, we got one,
Speaker 1: we got one, let's get in there. Yeah, that's the
Speaker 1: that's the lead of leads right there. And that's my
Speaker 1: impression of a junk mail dude. Yeah, that was good. Thanks,
Speaker 1: So there you go. UM. I also want to recommend
Speaker 1: an article on MSNBC by uh Sig Kersheimer, whose name
Speaker 1: I mispronounced at the beginning of this podcast, Sorry, Mr Kerheimer. UM.
Speaker 1: It's called Hey, junk mail, follow these steps and Mr
Speaker 1: Kersheimer has going to the trouble of basically giving every name, address,
Speaker 1: telephone number, and website you would need to completely rid
Speaker 1: your life a junk mail. So it's definitely worth reading.
Speaker 1: And if you want to read our take on it,
Speaker 1: you can type can I Stop getting junk Mail in
Speaker 1: the search bar at how stuff works dot com for
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