This is a very cool concept, greendimes, a new Palo-Alto startup which is focused on eliminating the amount of excessive junk mail that gets sent to all of our homes each and every day. According to greendimes, an individual can pay a $3 per month fee or a dime a day, (companies pay $6 per month), and in turn greendimes will “call, email and write” all of the mailing list / publishers that sell your personal data and get you off those mailing lists.

greendimes offers a reoccurring service because, even if we took the time to get ourselves off of these lists, the nature of our lives keeps us on those lists every time we make any kind of financial move, i.e refinance, move, get a new credit card, etc. According to greendimes they: “regularly request your information be removed from existing lists and we add new junk mailers to our list regularly.”

The green part of all of this is that greendimes will plant one tree per month per member to help replenish the 100 million plus trees that are chopped down every year exclusively to send scammy, shady direct mail to your mailbox every day. You have to admit, that rocks.

Check out their site, its full of interesting facts around the wasteful business of direct junk mail. Facts like:

“The typical American household receives about 70 pounds of junk mail a year.”

“The amount of junk mail sent grows by 3 billion pieces a year.”

I SO wish something like this was possible for SPAM email! I would definitely pay more than $3/month for a clean inbox and so would millions of other people. Just imagine all of the beneficiaries and philanthropy that could be fueled by such a service. Users could choose which cause their monthly “donation” goes to in exchange for a spam free inbox.

Now there is some wishful thinking

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 21st, 2006 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Media, Marketing, Business, Interesting Finds, Trends, Entrepreneurship, Ideas. 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.

Tags: greendimes, environmental, trees, directmail, junkmail, spam, philanthropy