Junk mail sucks.  I mean - it really sucks.  Somewhere around a 100 million trees are used every year in order to create the paper junk mail is written on, 250,000 homes could be heated with just one days supply of junk mail, and we, as Americans, are the lucky recipients of about 4 million tons of junk mail every year.  You can bet that the vast majority of that junk mail is not recycled, but sits rotting in our landfills.  Yep - junk mail just sucks.

Traditionally, in order to be removed from 'direct mailing' lists, you would first have to figure out who it's coming from (the company themselves or a direct mailing cooperation), hunt down the contact information, contact them personally and then request your name be removed (which you may be lucky enough to do by phone, but chances are they will require that you write in).  And according to my mailbox, I have hundreds of advertisers to track down..  A daunting and highly time consuming task to say the least.  

Enter the Junk Mail Avenger - Greendimes.com.  For a one time fee of $20, greendimes.com will do the tedious task of contacting all of those companies on your behalf to remove you from their junk mailing lists.  I recently signed up and have already seen a significant decrease in the bulk of my mailbox contents since doing so.  Not to mention that by decreasing the amount of mail sent to me, it's just one more way to decrease the amount of carbon being dumped in our atmosphere.  Stop junk, save the trees and fight global warming.  You go greendimes.

PS - If you can't part with the $20, then here's a great site listing out the steps you need to take to do the work yourself.  http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs4-junk.htm.