Who's who: Pankaj Shah, killer of junk mail

Sometimes when Greenbang goes home, especially after having been away for a week or two, he has to fight to push the door open–because there’s a huge pile of leaflets and spam mail promoting the local curry house, pizza take out and so on.

Pankaj Shah is in business to put that junk mail out of business–and cut down on all the wasted paper, and so on. His company is called GreenDimes and The NYT has a nice profile about the work he’s doing:

“Everybody gets junk mail, and nobody likes it,” Mr. Shah said.

The company pledges to plant one tree a month for every person who registers. According to the WildWest Institute, an estimated 100 million trees are destroyed each year to produce 4.5 million tons of junk mail, with 44 percent of that thrown away unopened.

GreenDimes keeps a crawl running on its home page, www.greendimes.com, showing that more than 310,590 trees have been preserved, more than 4 million gallons of water saved and nearly 1.6 million pounds of junk mail stopped by its efforts.

we’re just hoping he sets up shop in Europe sometime soon…