I too am irritated by the exact same issue the OP has. I’ve been living in the same place for years, and I managed to avoid receiving advertisments, for the most part. I always made sure, when I gave my adress to any company, to check whether or not they could sell/trade/give my adress to third parties, or their affiliates companies, and always insisted (sometimes in written form) than my adress shouldn’t be used for anything not related to the purchase/contract/whatever I was doing/signing/whatevering and that it shouldn’t be disclosed to any third party.
Halas, I just didn’t think about making this point clear with charities and NGO, and I receive manyrequests for money, subscriptions, guilty-loaded “gifts” (you can keep them, but please consider sending some money in exchange for such and such worthy cause). It’s not devastating my life, but I’m still irritated. I think I can somehow figure out by myself to whom I want to give money (and anyway, currently, I’m not in a position to do so), and how to get in touch with some association working on whatever issue I think is worthy. I really disliked to discover that these organizations acted like for-profit corporations do, and sold/traded their adresses lists.
Finally, exchanges after exchanges these traded adresses eventually find their way beyond the realm of charities. For instance, catholic associations/NGOs got my adress this way (from some other non-catholic NGO) . Some time later, I began to receive advertisment for catholic magazines which had nothing to do with charities, (and since i’m an atheist, I don’t have the slightest interest in suscribing to such magazines). Then, I began to receive offers of subscriptions for other mainstream magazines, newspapers, etc…Short of calling each of them and asking them to remove my adress from their listing, I’m pretty certain that quickly I would have had my mailbox filled with mails from every possible kind of company trying to sell me sofas, insurances or appartments. Exactly what I always tried to avoid.