We get a lot of unnecessary mail at our offices in Kent; stacks of sales circulars, periodicals, fliers, etc just make their way into the recycle bin. And while we support recycling, it’s a better solution to preemptively reduce waste than to let it pile up.
We’ve had many employees throughout the years, and often they were added to numerous mailing lists. Some of them no longer work here, but still receive piles of junk mail addressed to them.
We decided to do something about it. We’ve started a campaign to remove our address from as many mailing lists as possible.
Our team has contacted nearly 300 different vendors so far in an effort to bring our junk mail count to zero. This has been no small task. Multiple team members have coordinated in our effort to stop abundant waste from reaching our doors. We spoke to our resident mechatronics engineer, Jenna Glasure, who has been leading the charge in our efforts,
“I would say the majority of the mail was easy to unsubscribe from; I only had to send one request to unsubscribe either through chat or email. Some places weren’t as easy and required multiple inquires, to multiple people, to actually get a response. A couple of the promotional magazine places would send 20+ copies addressed to different people and those were always time consuming to deal with.
There are also a good amount of companies I have requested to unsubscribe from, and they don’t respond with any confirmation that they took us off the list, but the mail does stop.”
Although it’s been a tedious process, we’re happy the team has had success in reducing mail related waste. At Olsträd Engineering, reducing our carbon foot print is a priority. Achieving ISO 14001 certification is one of our goals, and we’re always finding ways to reduce waste.
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