100 Million Green Facts You Didn’t Know About Junk Mail
100 Million Trees Are Cut Each Year to Generate Junk Mail
A report by ForestEthics, the nonprofit environmental organization whose mission is to protect endangered forests, has made a very startling revelation: that there are 100 million green reasons why junk mail are an annoying intrusion.
Not that the 100 billion pieces of junk mail Americans receive each year are irksome enough or that the emissions of junk mail are equal to those of over nine million cars or 51 million tons of greenhouse gases.
The group estimates that every year, more than 100 million trees are cut down to make junk mail - the equivalent of clear-cutting all of Rocky Mountain National Park every 4 months!
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According to the report (PDF), those trees come from endangered forests like Canada’s Boreal, the forests of the Southeastern United States, Indonesia and northern Europe, as well as smaller areas of rare or disappearing forest ecosystems in the Western United States, Brazil, Chile, and Russia.
In the Boreal alone, the equivalent of over 220,000 acres of forest are destroyed every year to make junk mail in the United States. ForestEthics statistics show that US junk mail makes up almost 10% of all the timber harvested in the Canadian Boreal, by volume as well as by
harvest area.
The report which attempts to assess junk mail effects on global warming features a myth and fact section that debunks alleged misinformation spread in the wake of ForestEthics’ Do Not Mail campaign.
Jim Ford, the report’s author, said: “Junk mail has implications for climate change that start in the forest, continue through paper production, printing and distribution, and end with recycling or landfilling.”
Image credit: Tanya Ryno at Flickr under a Creative Commons license
@ke - did you even look at the photo at the top of this article? showing a snailmailbox?
I must get at least three credit card offers per week or more at times. Some weeks the only mail I get is all junk mail.What a waste!
Without junk mail, the USPS has significant problems. If we require junk mail to be made from 100% recycled material, the trees are saved and the USPS stats in business. In addition, it would create a strong demand for recycled paper products.
I always found it funny that when you bank with an institution they have somewhere on your monthly statement that you should switch to paper billing because it saves x amount of trees a year. But the same institution will send me 20 credit offers a year!
I work in the web printing industry and produce some junk mail - the majority of our paper comes from europe and is produced from plantation timber which is a renewable source.
A lot of our customers are concerned with the source of the timber for the paper and we now have a program called chain of custody to verify the source of the timber/paper to our clients.
We also use some recycled paper stocks but most of the recycled paper but the quality is poor so it mostly goes into cardboard as far as i am aware.
http://officeofstrategicinfluence.com/bulkmailer/
Check out the preceding website. Apparently, you can tape those postage-paid return envelopes and tape them to bricks, and mail them back to the company. It costs them about twenty-five bucks per brick. Pretty nifty, eh?
Yeah I really hate receiving phone books as well. I probably used one twice in the last 4 years. What a waste!
Oh my God! I didn’t thought about this. 100 Million Trees are just too much!
Thats Prety bad! I hate junk mail.
I’m so sick of junk mail, I could scream. During the average week I get maybe, 5 pieces of real mail as I have tried to go paperless with most of my accounts. However, I get over 100 pieces of junk mail a week. Not only are they killing trees for this, it uses more petrol to carry it to my mail box, I use electricity to shread all the pieces with my address on them, and then I have to use petrol taking it all to the recycling center! I’ve even tried requesting companies cease sending me catalogs but they won’t stop. Why can’t they just send me an email to tell me they are having a sale? Kudos to Lowe’s, Sears, and Home Depot who have stopped sending hard copy flyers to me and send emails instead.