BELLOWS FALLS — The Commons not mailing to this subscriber, as requested, is appreciated and is in sharp contrast to the practice of the publishers of the four non-subscription papers that arrive weekly in my Bellows Falls mailbox.
These four papers are the Bellows Falls Town Crier, The River Record, The Shopper, and The Message for the Week. They all just keep coming, despite emails as well as phone contact with each publisher over the past few months.
Emails to each publisher seem to have been ignored, but my subsequent cheerful phone calls to each were all met with cheerful assurances that the mailings would quickly stop.
The yearly impact from these four papers is a total of 47 or pounds (or more) of unwanted paper. For every 43 mailboxes that don't want those papers, that's more than one ton of paper trucked from some distant pulpwood forest and/or pulp paper trader to the mill, trucked to the press, trucked to the post office, delivered by the U.S. Postal Service, and then schlepped to a recycling transfer station by readers.
But wait; we're not quite done. They're then trucked from the transfer station to the Windham Solid Waste Management District (WSWMD) facility, only to be trucked from the WSWMD to somewhere else ... and on, and on. If I sold pulp wood, pulp paper, mill chemicals, paper, ink, gas, or diesel fuel, I'd think this was all grand.
Since personal contact with each paper has proven useless, it's likely those papers won't consult Do Not Mail lists either. It's my hope those four publishers read this real news outlet, and consider the plea of this reader, along with the pleas of others who don't want their mailboxes filled with fish wrappers of no interest.