How can I get the News & Observer to stop littering in front of my house and in the rest of the yards of my neighboring with their weekly free dumping, er, distribution, of The Durham News?

I have no criticism of the content of The Durham News. I even enjoy reading it on occasion. I just absolutely hate their method of distribution. By tossing a paper in a plastic bag in front of every house, they are:

1) Forcing people who’d prefer not to have litter in front of their homes to bend down and pick it up. I know it may sound like a petty grievance, but the simple act of bending down isn’t quite so easy for everyone, and it’s aggravated when the motivation is to pick up something that you yourself didn’t put on the group in the first place.

2) Forcing people who’d prefer not to have litter in front of their homes to find a disposal method for the delivery. The newspaper is recyclable. How about that plastic bag? I’m assuming that is, too. But they’ve just given me two extra pieces of trash to recycle, and they’ve done it willfully, not accidentally, like when the Durham sanitation department “accidentally” leaves a ton of wrappers and leaflets strwen across the streets after their morning pick-ups.

3) Becoming the main litterers in the neighborhood, since about half of the papers left out in my neighborhood after never picked up at all. They become soggy messes on the sidewalk, an eyesore on my daily walks along what is generally an aesthetically pleasing path.

Why can’t The Durham News be distributed in bins like The Independent? Would no one bother to go out of their way to fish out a copy

Fine, then. PUT IT IN MY MAILBOX. At least that would put them on par for annoyance with Dominos. I can collect the contents on my mailbox in one fluid action.

What if my weekly coupon circulars were just strewn across my lawn? I’d resent the obnoxiousness of the distributors and toss them out without a second look. At least, since they come in my mailbox, I sometimes take a peek at them. What if any of the materials and I normally expect to find in my mailbox were tossed, in plastic bags, in front of my house? Why does no one else do this? Why does The News and Observer get an exemption?

So I need to tell The News and Observer to just stop it. I know their publication is actually of a far higher caliber than their distribution method, but they irritate me to the point of wanting to swiftly discard of, what appears to me, this trash in front of my house.