Junk Mail and the Environmental Costs

Although we've been diligent over the years at working to reduce our mail solicitations, there always seems to be 'stuff' we would never buy that someone is offering to sell to us.

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A number of groups and organizations are working to decrease the junk mail clutter and Salon recently wrote about the environmental impact and a few of the active groups:

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The amount of direct mail that catalog companies, Internet purveyors, and coupon captains send out each year continues to climb, up from 90.5 billion pieces in 2003 to a whopping 103.5 billion pieces in 2007, according to the U.S. Postal Service. "It's a colossal waste," says Kristi Chester Vance, communications director of ForestEthics, a group that has worked to reduce the environmental impact of the catalog industry.

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In fact, the annual greenhouse-gas emissions from the production of junk mail are equal to those of 3.5 million cars. (That figure doesn't include emissions from transporting and disposing of the stuff.) Beyond that, each year junk mail production in the U.S. consumes more than 96.7 billion gallons of water and more than 100 million trees, ForestEthics estimates. Most of those, says Chester Vance, come from carbon-dioxide-sequestering, biologically diverse old-growth forests, rather than from sustainably managed tree farms. And according to the Environmental Protection Agency, only about a third of all junk mail is recycled. "All that for a response rate of less than 3 percent," Chester Vance notes, referring to the fact that fewer than 3 percent of people -- often even fewer -- respond to the solicitations.