Do you want to reduce your carbon footprint? Reducing the amount of junk mail in your mailbox can help. The average American household gets about 41 pounds of junk mail each year. All of that junk mail doesn’t appear out of thin air-designing, printing and mailing it uses up natural resources and produces greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.
How big is junk mail’s carbon footprint? Understanding that requires a closer look at the life cycle of junk mail. According to this white paper by Pitney Bowes, there are 6 stages in the junk mail life cycle:
- Designing the letter and envelope.
- Manufacturing the paper.
- Printing/producing the letter.
- Sending it out in the mail.
- The victim, I mean the “consumer,” receives the junk mail.
- The junk mail is thrown away or recycled.
So, how much carbon is generated during each of these steps? Pitney Bowes, a direct mail company, claims that step #4 generates about 20 grams of carbon per letter. Steps 1-3 generate .9 to 1.3 grams of carbon per gram of paper. Based on these numbers, Pitney Bowes estimates that every letter generates about 17.9 grams of carbon dioxide.
Using these numbers, the carbon footprint of junk mail seems small in comparison to common, everyday household activities like running the dishwasher. However, these small amounts of carbon do add up. Also, their estimate is not complete, as they do not include the amount of carbon dioxide generated through the disposal of junk mail. Additionally, they only look at letters, not catalogs.
Forest Ethics, a group that advocates for a nationwide Do Not Mail list, has also estimated the carbon footprint of US junk mail. Their analysis estimates the total amount of carbon dioxide produced annually by all American junk mail campaigns, looking at every step from paper production to disposal. Including direct mail catalogs, Forest Ethics estimates that junk mail produces 51,548,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year.
That’s about as much carbon dioxide as would be produced by 9,372,000 average-sized passenger cars, according to Forest Ethics. Junk mail’s carbon footprint is not so little when you look at it that way!
Besides, mail that you don’t want is inherently wasteful-and most junk mail is unwanted. About 44 percent of it never even gets opened. Even when people open it, most of them throw it away without responding. A response rate of 2 percent is considered “good” by industry standards, according to the New York Times. That means that most of the carbon dioxide produced by junk mail is being produced for no good reason at all. And that irritates me even more than a mailbox full of junk!
Author Alison Kroulek is a freelance writer living in Chattanooga, TN. She likes hiking, backpacking, gardening and doing what she can to save the planet.
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