The Catalog Canceling Challenge: An Easy Earth Month Project for Kids

You know those annoying sales catalogs that show up a little too often in your overcrowded mailbox? The ones that go straight into the recycling bin? At The Park School, in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I teach fourth grade, these catalogs were a problem. We were receiving over 30 per day. Some weekly catalogs were addressed to teachers who had retired years earlier.

So we decided to do something about it.

We held a friendly "Catalog Canceling Challenge" among grades 3-5 to see which group of kids could cancel the most catalogs in 30 days. Some kids took school catalogs home to cancel, others canceled their parents' unwanted catalogs. Thinking the students might cancel a few hundred, I built a small wooden bin in a school hallway with three columns - one for each grade - to display their piles of canceled catalogs. This structure served as a physical bar graph showing the contest unfold over the month.

To both my delight and my dismay, all three columns were full in eight days, and the third grade started a wobbly 4-foot pile next to its side of the bin. I had to build additional columns for the kids to drop in more - hundreds and hundreds more. They got into it and enjoyed doing their small part to help the environment. Some went door-to-door in their neighborhoods offering to cancel neighbors' catalogs; several children canceled more than 100 each.

After 30 days, 145 children in the three grades had opted out of 4,125 catalogs. If stacked, this would be a 30-foot-tall pile! Everyone was stunned by the results of their efforts. That was two years ago. Last year they canceled 3,000 and this year they canceled 4,466! Over 10,000 catalogs canceled by one elementary school in three years! These kids were totally into it.

Sounds encouraging, right? Consider, though, that, the catalog industry mails out 10,000 catalogs every 17 seconds. (Nineteen billion catalogs are mailed per year. That's 50 million a day, and, assuming 11 catalogs per inch, that's enough to make a 70-mile-tall stack of catalogs - 12 times the height of Mount Everest - each day.) Only 2% of these catalogs are actually used by consumers to make a purchase. 2%.

If a child cancels 60 catalogs, they can stop 360 from being made and mailed (and they can earn a special patch!). This saves one tree. It also saves hundreds of gallons of water and much energy. These are impressive results that tie a simple kid-friendly action - canceling catalogs - to preventing deforestation, conserving water and energy, and slowing global warming.

Allowing children to take action about issues that they hear about and that may worry them helps them gain control over their world and some of its troubles. It gives them reassurance that they can make a difference and that we will solve these problems. As one of my students once said, "Earth is like a human. When the human gets a fever, we get chicken soup and get to watch TV. Then we get all better. When Earth gets a fever, it has no TV or chicken soup. So it doesn't get better as quickly. We need to do everything we can to give something like a TV or something like chicken soup to Earth right now."

In taking on this service-learning work - like the recycling program the kids run at school, or the green movement and its implied life changes that are now sinking into our societal consciousness - these children are providing our planet with some relief, helping in its time of need. Giving her some chicken soup! (Oh, and by the way, their parents were thrilled to get rid of those pesky catalogs.)

After our class participated in a live interview on NBC's Today Show, other schools, and Girl Scout troops, have joined our project. In fact, more than 5,000 children have participated so far in 15 states. They have canceled over 34,000 unwanted sales catalogs saving 562 trees, almost 600,000 gallons of water, and much energy and therefore global warming pollution.

This April - Earth Month - we hope that more schools and scout troops will join and help us reach our goal of canceling 100,000 catalogs.

If you know any green teachers, scout leaders, or kids who want to make a green difference in 2010, pass on our project to them. Thanks!

 

Comments

[Weirdwriter]

12:47 AM on 04/06/2010

There are some catalogs I've been trying to cancel for years. Yes, years. I call, get Customer Service and am told sure, but it will be a few more months before they finally stop. They never do.

And others cancel, but as soon as you order something from their online store, the catalogs instantly start up again without any request to do so.

How do we stop this?

[lyingtruth]

12:54 AM on 04/06/2010

Did you try Opera?

[Ted Wells]

07:33 AM on 04/06/2010

Isn't that annoying! Or they start sending you a new catalog with a slightly different name on it to your address. Like your name with a middle initial...sneaky and dishonest.

Many companies will respect your wishes and stop, but some just keep cranking them out knowing that a little under 2% will buy their products. Doesn't seem like a healthy respect for the customer to me. Bad business on one level, but it work$ on the other. That's the problem. Catalogs make economic sense...BUT don't make any environmental sense. They're hugely energy intensive and 98% are never used. 44% are never opened.

The ultimate solution is passing an enforceable "Do Not Mail" law like the very popular "Do Not Call" registry. 89% of those surveyed favor this. For more on this, see DoNotMail.org.