Please Stop!

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Dear {name of organization},

I know {PICK ONE: from your previous work, from our conversations, from your reputation} that you are passionate about addressing our climate challenges. As such, I was very surprised at the contents of the large {PICK ONE: FEDEX, Express mail, mail} package that recently arrived for me.

While I’m sure that your {PICK ONE: marketing collateral, report} is interesting and informative, I have to tell you that I recycled it to the best of my ability without reading it. All of the information that you chose to send to me (remember, I didn’t ask for it), is already available online or could easily be put there. That way I could access it for effectively zero environmental cost, compared to your approach, which was far more wasteful. In addition to the impact of shipping your package, your material {CHOOSE ALL THAT APPLY: used non-recycled paper, is printed with inks that will make it hard to recycle, is bound in a way that makes it hard to recycle, has lots of environmentally unfriendly glossy pictures, included excess packaging, was shipped by air even though it wasn’t time critical}.

As Marshall Mcluhan said, the medium is the message. Your message to me was that you only care about the environment when its convenient. I doubt that is the message that you really wanted to send, but that’s what arrived in my mailbox.

If you’d still like me to take a look at some of your stuff, I’ll look forward to an email with an attachment or link to the material.

Regards,

Dave

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I just arrived back from an series of trips to find about a foot of mail, and the bulk of it was stacks of unsolicited material from supposedly sustainable organizations. Presumably you know who you are and can customize the letter above appropriately.

For the rest of you, feel free to reuse this letter yourself. Let’s put an end to the insanity!