Receive your mail as e-mail (where possible)
Place a 'No Junk Mail' sign on you letter box, it may save you on average 30kg of unsolicited mail a year. When possible receive your solicited mail (newsletters, etc) through email. Use a statement stopper on your bank accounts and view them online. If an organization doesn't offer such a service, and there isn't any reason why they shouldn't, ask them if they could. You can few many brochures online, identical to the paper version, downloadable in many cases as a PDF.
Say NO to the junk mail slyly folded inside 'Community Newspapers', and say NO to Real Estate Agencies (illegal) ignorance of your 'No Junk Mail' sign, some Property Publications in particular are often folded into a 'Community Newspaper', it is a fairly heavy publication itself, generally several times the size of the publication it is 'smuggled' in with.
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a study on reducing junk mail
An interesting study of the Junk Mail problem...
http://www.northshorecity.govt.nz/PDFs/WasteMinimisationPDF/Reducing-Junk-Mail-in-North-Shore.pdf
Encourage chain retailers to
Encourage chain retailers to put their catalogues on line. That way if you want to see what's on sale at somewhere like Briscoes (who do have there catalogues on line) you can check without all that wasted paper!
Observation and question
As an ex-junk deliverer (It is how I paid for my 1st year at uni) I found that irrespective of the number of 'no junk mail' stickers on my run, the number of papers we were given remained the same. So, by the end of the 6 years I spent delivering junk mail, I usually had at least 20 of each pamphlet left at the end of my run (when you are delivering about 8 different pamphlets a week this ends up being quite a lot!). I am a fanatical paper recycler, so did put it all out for the paper chaser to pick up.
But I am wondering whether other pamphlet delivery folk do the same... I know that many kids just dumped their extras in parks, over random fences or in the wheelie bins etc, so perhaps it would be better to take the junk mail & make sure that you are recycling it, at least that way you know that it is being recycled? That is what I do...
mail goes e?
Arguably receiving the junk-mail even to recycle it is not addressing the problem of it's wastefulness, part of the thing i see with us being more responsible about our production and waste, is at the very least for unsolicited mail production volumes to be tailored only to those who want it. The companies themselves would save money, and we wouldn't have a surplus of unused paper.
Maybe a site set especially for promotional NZ e-material could be set up, one gets e-mailed with a notification of updated brochures through the site... spam legislation would be adhered too, your letter box isn't full, and you get only the relevant 'junk-mail' you want. Companies would be able to know what the customer was actually looking for, the customer would be able to have more choice and be able to filter out the unwanted noise. Might sound like pie-in-the-sky, but it's completely possible.