Catalog shopping offers consumers many benefits, including convenience, time-savings, and the ability to purchase hard-to-find and niche products. Catalogs also give smaller businesses access to a market landscape dominated by large box retail chains. While catalog shopping may provide some environmental benefits, the millions of unwanted catalogs Americans receive in their mailbox represent a significant environmental burden, devouring natural resources, generating pollutants, and clogging municipal waste systems—for something that quickly ends up in the trash or recycling bin. While catalog companies make it easy to receive a catalog, consumers frequently find it frustrating and time consuming to get their names off these mailing lists, especially when they receive catalogs from multiple direct mailers. The industry mails more than 19 billion catalogs a year to Americans—approximately 170 catalogs for every U.S. household.

Catalog Choice offers an easy-to-use solution for consumers and merchants. Catalog Choice aims to reduce the number of unwanted catalog mailings and to promote the adoption of sustainable industry best practices. Catalogchoice.org, which launched in October 2007, is a free, title-specific service that gives people a convenient way to have their names removed from unwanted catalog mailing lists, while at the same time helping to reduce global warming, waste, and deforestation associated with catalog production, distribution, and disposal. Catalog Choice for Merchants provides direct mail companies with a free, secure, and easy way to honor these opt-out requests. Catalog Choice is a project of the National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Ecology Center. The project is funded by the Overbrook Foundation, the Merck Family Fund, and the Kendeda Fund.

• Formally support Catalog Choice and its mission to reduce the number of unwanted catalog mailings.
• Urge catalog companies to honor the mail preferences expressed by Catalog Choice participants.
• Call for the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) to retract its November 30, 2007 statement asking its members to refuse to accept name removal data from groups such as Catalog Choice.