I don’t like those bloody flyers coming into my door with a smiling election candidate whoring for my vote. Doesn’t matter what the party. Now, the Greens are into their tuna-friendly dolphin eating and the likes.
So how about setting up an online register for those that don’t want your flyers or any other flyer from a politician? NoFlyers.ie or something like that? Surely the Greens would support such an idea, wouldn’t they? Would they honour such a system? Would Bertie’s party do likewise since he is now not just a socialist but an environmentalist too?
If we build it, will they honour it? Think of the trees!
I’ve been meaning to make stickers out of this Paint Shop Pro special on my desktop since I saw something similar in the UK months ago.
http://explic.it/media/v/things/No+Junk+Mail+Please.html
The intention was to get a waste management company that I deal with to sponsor the printing, and cover the shipping by using them as a marketing gimmick for Freeb.ie.
Another Beecher project, in other words. 🙂
(They’re for letterboxes.)
I recently got totally fed up with this too, so I signed up to the Irish Direct Marketing Association junk mail blacklist and taped a small ‘No Junk Mail Please’ note to my letterbox.
Within a couple of weeks I went from half a dozen pieces of junk mail a day to none at all. Even the local pizza places seem to respect the request of my little sign.
339 millions pieces of paper
i did a really rough calc [warning: beer mat calc]
42 constituencies x 11 candidates x 21 shots x 35000 voters
result http://url.ie/2zl
more trees than seamus brennan gave away for the new millennium.
may I ask that they print on both sides of each sheet and parties that share the same ideology (of the market) like FF FG LAB GP SF share the same manifesto & mail shots, and stop the kidding that yis are all different shades of capitalism. can we not lock them all in the helix for 8 weeks and get shinawil.ie to count the txts.
Great idea Damien, full support. Am off to hug a tree now.
Not a goer. As things stand, you can’t run an election without fliers. You would be wasting your time going from door to door. You would be denying your message to a large proportion of the market. Also, you would be foregoing your free postage privilege.
Antoin,
I actually disagree. Most of the parties have reasonably comprehensive websites so if someone comes to my door and asks to leave a flier, I’ll tell them I’ll just look at their websites instead. In fact, I had a brief sconce at all of them in the last week for blogrelated purposes. The truth is I have so much junk and fliers coming in through my letter box right now, I’m getting annoyed with it and pretty much all of what comes through the door goes straight to the recycling bin.
Some people are going to need fliers, but anyone with an internet connection isn’t going to. The amount of paper used can be cut massively.
I put a “no junk mail” sticker on my door a year ago and it’s dramatically reduced the amount of unsolicited mail I get. Thing is, the political parties think their material is sooo important it’s not junk so they put it in the letterbox regardless…I guess junk is in the eye of the beholder?