An absolutely phenomenal thing happened earlier this month: The University of Idaho gave the higher education world a blueprint for ridding campus post offices of junk mail. Please run with it! Students, faculty, staff, everyone spread it as fast as you can!

On Nov 2 the University of Idaho announced that it will stop delivering bulk mail on January 1st. After that date, they will send junk mail straight to recycling and notify the senders that they should only keep sending junk mail to University of Idaho addresses if they want to waste their money. It’s absolutely brilliant!

When I worked on a university campus, visiting the post office used to make me sick to my stomach. Reliably, the trash cans (and recycling bins) would be stuffed with unwanted and unsolicited credit card applications and catalogs. I remember thinking about asking the campus post office to refuse bulk mail, but I never took it up with anyone because I figured it would be illegal for a post office to screen mail like that. I guess it isn’t. Or, at least, the counsel at University of Idaho have found away around that problem.

University of Idaho deserves extra commendation for the fact that their waste reduction efforts don’t stop with bulk postal mail. The ban on bulk postal mail is being paired with an aggressive effort to stop on-campus bulk mail. All departments are being encouraged to go electronic with their mass communications.

Congratulations to University of Idaho for leading the way! Let’s hope the idea spreads like a weed!

(I figured that hoping something will “spread like wildfire” might be a little insensitive given recent events.)

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 11th, 2007 at 12:08 am and is filed under Campus Operations, Recycling & Waste Min., Sam Hummel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.