This Valentine's Day, we hope your mailbox is stuffed with surprises. But the rest of the year, most of us would like to cut back on the amount of unwanted paper that shows up on our doorsteps.

According to the EPA, we each get about 40 pounds of

junk mail every year. In fact, each Post Office letter carrier delivers about 17.8 tons of bulk mail annually--44 percent of which goes unopened. And a whopping 78 percent of this mail is not recycled. 

Want to do something about it? Catalog Choice, a new online service sponsored by the Ecology Center, allows you to decide what hits your mailbox. When you register, the service contacts catalog providers on your behalf and asks them to remove your name from their lists. And the great news: It's free.

But we think the best part is the environmental benefit. Each year, it takes an estimated 53 million trees to produce the 19 billion catalogs that are mailed to U.S. consumers. Not to mention the environmental costs of transporting, processing and delivering the mail.

Next, take it a step further--by ending those annoying credit card offers. Register free at OptOutPrescreen.com and they'll remove your name from the mailing lists of the four major credit solicitation firms for five years (or permanently, if you'd like).

So trim the fat from your mailbox once and for all. You'll save yourself the time it takes to sort through the junk and you'll make sure that less paper ends up in our landfills. Now that's a resolution we all can keep.

Want more advice on how you can stop receiving unsolicited mail? Check out these tips from the EPA.

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