Kids Use The Force to Kill Catalogs

By Steve Enders - December 30, 2008 Fourth-grade teacher Ted Wells has been fired up about wasteful catalogs for some time now. It's been a few months since he wrote an article for Tonic about his frustrations, but Mr. Wells hasn't been laying down. Saving the planet wasn't a passing or short-lived obsession with Mr. Wells. He has taken his catalog-killing campaign to new heights with the Catalog Canceling Challenge and well-timed articles over at the Huffington Post. Everyone with a mailbox knows that holiday mail is a parade of paper waste coming day after day. So Mr. Wells stepped things up and had his class create a clever Star Wars spoof with Darth Vader representing the evil catalog empire. With Mr. Wells, it's obviously fun to help save the earth. But it's not all fun and games. Mr. Wells is rallying other classrooms, Girl and Boy Scout troops and others around the country to join in his rebellion, and the ranks are swelling. Through Mr. Wells' campaign, over 1,000 kids around the country are responsible for taking more than 16,000 catalogs out of the mail. That's no junk. So congrats to Mr. Wells, his students and supporters at The Park School in Brookline, Mass., and others who have joined the good fight. Keep up the good work. Oh, and if Luke Skywalker isn't your thing, don't forget you can always join GreenDimes, which makes catalog-killing way easier than blowing up the Death Star.