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„Too much wood, water, chemicals and paint are used in vain.“
Introduction
In Hungary and in some parts of Europe the supermarkets send unaddressed advertising magazines without postage to the mailboxes of people every week - many times against the will of the people. These are all advertising material from the near supermarkets, which include such information as how much does the bread cost. Apart from this, it occurs in almost every parts of the world that people get direct marketing letters (junk mail) addressed to them with postage, against their will. This advertising stuff is usually goes into the dustbin, so wastage happens. The scale of this wastage is big, so big that it can alter the state of our environment (for a flat in a small town in Hungary, about 1.45 kg of postage-less advertising material came in one month). Too much wood, water, chemicals and paint is used for this in vain. It is not environmentally friendly, neither sustainable, because the wood may be needed for heating and for other purposes anyway when there will be less fossil fuels for mankind. More wood would be needed also if we wanted to use paper bags instead of plastic bags. One question remained: when to start to decrease the wastage: even now or when the crisis comes. It is probable that it is worthy to change to a more sparing lifestyle as soon as possible, with a gradual accustoming to that, because if it has to be done abruptly, that may cause trouble (mankind should return to the sparing lifestyle much faster than his lifestyle became extravagant).
2008
I, Árpád Fekete, as far as I remember, started to take care of environmentalism about the end of the year 2008, and I started to develop an environmentalist homepage soon (but it might have been in 2009), in which I mentioned the wastage of advertising magazines, the wastage of the packaging material of daily food, and a creative way to reuse the silver paper inside the packaging of boxed drinks (to create polyhedra), and also GreenPeace. The development of that homepage stopped (as well as some of my other homepages), but the goal of decreasing the wastage of advertising magazines remained in me, as an efficient goal.
2009
In 2009, I set a goal to decrease the amount of the many-page advertising magazines which are without stamps, postage or address. Back in 2009 I have written two writings about this topic, which can be read here:
2010
Then in 2010 I tried that in practice. For example, I wanted to convince the people to put signs on their mailboxes which would discourage advertising material:
Apart from that, I have written to 20 supermarket chains in Hungary to make their advertising magazines more environmentally friendly. About this attempt of mine, and about its possible result you can read more on the following link:
2011
Because of the lack of great success of my former petition I turned towards the political solution. But before that, in 2011 I returned once again to the idea of convincing supermarkets, because I have realized that I can try it by collecting signatures on the ThePetitionSite.Com website, addressing my petition to international supermarket chains. Sadly I could collect less than 100 signatures on the internet, and I have not got answer to my petition at all:
2012
Next I may send petition to supermarkets only if there is a name of an organization behind it and 10000 signatures will seem reachable. Instead, it is worthy to create a plan of a law (bill), and suggest it to the parliament. I've already started this next round, info here:
2013
In 2013, was registered to Twitter and tweeted to the accounts of three Hungarian politicans that the planned tax of advertisements should tax the paper advertisement magazines more, and the commercials at televisions less. Maybe they've read it, maybe not. By the way, in 2013, I only planned to write a short essay about the entire topic, in Hungarian and English, which might have been the theoretical foundation of what to do with this project in the next years (the essay would have given a brief introduction, and survey research, new types of public opinion research, economic research, research about the enforcement of messages that prohibit advertisement magazines, and connections with different representatives would have been suggested). However, I realized that I have too little time and power, so I've decided to discontinue the project until there is much more money for it. Even if I do not spend more time with this project, this does not mean that I do nothing for success in a passive way: so, if I work on the popularization of the homepage describing the project, then this project has progress indirectly...
Supermarkets; I throw your flyers into garbage!
I thought that we should join our forces with the authors of the Red Dot Campaign (what was a Canadian campaign to reduce the wastage of advertising magazines and flyers), but this would need time as well.
2014
In this year, I consider some search keywords worth sharing, which lead to information on the Internet in connection with the topic:
"SPAR Átgondolt szórólapkiadás a fenntarthatóság jegyében": what I was writing about, although the original source has gone offline.
"Stop Junk Mail campaigner"
: British website with much more information.Although I have no time to partake in this project in an active way, but it may be worth sharing the main developments here. In 2014, in Hungary, the introduction of the new advertisement tax means a great burden on big commercial television channels, but this might also have a beneficial side-effect for limiting the advertising material of supermarket chains. Sadly, it is hard to learn about or understand this law, so I actually don't know its effect on supermarket chains yet.