Like felling 24,000 trees: green group wants to make it easier to opt out of getting election mail
Green Earth urging public to sign online petition to simplify procedures for being taken off circulation list
Voters must be given clear guidelines on how to opt out of receiving printed campaign leaflets in order to cut down on waste, an environmental group said.
And, even for this small number of voters, the materials could still have ended up in their mailboxes as candidates were not required to heed their wishes.
The group estimated that about 200 million sheets of A4 paper – equivalent to the felling of 24,000 trees – were used for election mail this year, up 13 per cent on the last Legislative Council polls in 2012.
Candidates are entitled to send election mail for free. The Green Earth estimated 50 million pamphlets were posted this year.
Hahn Chu Hon-keung, the group’s environmental advocacy director, said voters who wished not to receive printed election materials faced complicated and lengthy procedures to opt out.
“It turns out even some hotline operators at the Electoral Affairs Commission were not aware of the option,” he said.
Circle Fong, a voter from New Territories East, said he was at first told the opt-out arrangement was not available.
“But eventually they found out the procedures and agreed to send me a confirmation form by mail,” he said.
However, election advertisements still landed in Fong’s mailbox as the commission merely passed on the information to candidates, who could ultimately decide whether to heed voters’ requests. An official information packet carrying ballot details and a brief introduction to all candidates were also posted regardless of one’s opt-out request.
The Green Earth is now calling on the public to sign a petition at the online campaign platform Support HK to demand the commission include the opt-out option in future voter registration forms, while existing voters could choose to receive information by emails.
The commission said it had been encouraging candidates to distribute their campaign materials by electronic means.
It added that 550,000 voters had provided email addresses to the commission to receive such materials and that no address label would be provided for these voters so that candidates would try to reach them through email.
A separate voluntary measure introduced in 2012 allowed Legco candidates to avoid sending duplicate materials to households with multiple voters.
But The Green Earth found that 24 candidates – or more than a quarter of them – still sent each voter a copy of their leaflets, even though some were registered under identical addresses.
