by Will Craven

Can I play devil’s advocate a bit?

Unjunkmail.com has quickly set up shop and established itself as a center for conversation about junk mail’s annoyance and environmental impacts. That’s awesome.

It’s cool to see the national junk mail conversation expanding, and Unjunkmail’s recent blog posts—on junk mail’s impacts on climate, Canada’s Boreal forests, and Southern US forests—all provide firm evidence that junk mail is not only annoying but pretty freakin’ serious.

But is the direct mail industry taking it seriously?

US junk mail requires the logging of 100 million trees each year. Junk mailers endlessly repeat that paper is recyclable, but hardly any of them use any recycled content. Deforestation accounts for 20% of global carbon emissions—more than all the world’s trains, planes, and automobiles combined. If we want to address deforestation, junk mail is an easy place to start.

With these facts in mind, only a few questions need to be answered:

1.    Was the passage of the 2003 Do Not Call Registry, giving Americans the choice to stop getting annoying telemarketing calls, a good thing?
2.    Knowing that junk mail combines nuisance with large and unnecessary environmental impacts, isn’t the argument for Do Not Mail arguably stronger than the argument for Do Not Call?
3.    Would Do Not Call be as effective if the industry had been allowed to run it themselves? Are industry-run opt-out tools an acceptable substitute for consumer choice that’s enforced by law?

I imagine most Americans’ answers to those questions are Yes, Yes, and Probably Not:
Over 180 million phone numbers have been put on the Do Not Call Registry, and according to a 2007 Zogby poll, 89% of Americans support the creation of a Do Not Mail Registry.

The Direct Marketing industry’s answers are almost certainly No, No, and Please God Yes. If accurate, those answers don’t take junk mail’s environmental impacts—or consumer choice—seriously enough.

Unjunkmail endorses some helpful but not necessarily enforceable opt-out tools. They haven’t endorsed a Do Not Mail Registry, even though direct mailers should welcome the opportunity to find out exactly which Americans are willing to receive junk mail, and which aren’t. Americans deserve a Do Not Mail Registry, just as they deserved Do Not Call—something enforceable, something that actually satisfies consumers, and something that meets full scope of the challenge before it.

It could be so easy. It could sharply reduce unnecessary logging at a time when we must sharply reduce unnecessary logging. The world may face some tough decisions in the near future. This isn’t one of them.

William Craven is the media officer for ForestEthics. Their Do Not Mail Campaign has collected the signatures of over 100,000 Americans calling for a national Do Not Mail Registry.

We’ve covered several different ways to reuse your junk mail-everything from using it in your garden to making jewelry out of it. But what if you don’t have a garden? What if you aren’t crafty? What if you just have too much of the stuff around to do anything productive with?

The most environmentally-friendly way to deal with junk mail is to recycle it, one way or another.  Fortunately, there are many different places where you can lighten your junk mail load without sending it to the local landfill. According to Earth911.com, 87 percent of Americans currently have access to some type of community recycling program. If you don’t recycle already, here are some options that might be available in your community:

• Kick it to the curb: Many communities do offer curbside recycling.  In fact, over 50% of the US population can recycle their junk mail without ever leaving home. Almost all  recycling programs now take glossy paper, like direct mail catalogs, in addition to regular paper. To see if curbside recycling is available where you live, contact your municipality. Oh, and don’t forget to shred junk mail like credit card offers, which could be used by identity thieves.

• Take it to the post office: In October 2008, the US Postal Service began placing secure recycling bins in post office lobbies. The initial program was quite successful, and in March of 2009 they expanded the program to cover a total of 5,900 post office locations. To see if there is a participating post office near you, go to Earth911.com’s search page and search for “mail.”

• Find a recycling center: Even if you don’t have curbside recycling, there’s probably a recycling center in your area if you know where to look. You can find nearby recycling locations for a variety of different materials, including paper, at Earth911.com.

By recycling your junk mail instead of throwing it away, you can help reduce the amount of trees that need to be cut down to make paper, reduce the amount of energy used in paper production, and reduce the amount of pollution generated by making paper. Plus, you’ll have to take out the trash less often. That’s what I call a win-win situation!

The holiday season is coming, bringing with it the inevitable deluge of unsolicited catalogs. If you’re feeling crafty, here’s one environmentally-friendly way to use them up: make them into paper beads and string them into jewelry! If you have kids, this is also a great way to keep them occupied when the weather turns sour.

Here’s how to do it, step by step:

Materials:

Junk mail-you can use any type of junk mail, but catalogs are best because they are colorful.

Scissors

White glue or a glue stick

Wax paper

Thread, elastic or cord for a necklace or bracelet

A toothpick

Optional decorations: Mod Podge (for a glossy finish), paint,  glitter and/or UTEE embossing powder (not for kids!)

Instructions:

Step 1: Cover your work surface with wax paper. This will greatly simplify clean up.

Step 2: Cut your junk mail into long, skinny triangles.

Step 3: Roll the wide end of one of the triangles tightly around the toothpick..

Step 4. Continue rolling the paper in a tight coil around the toothpick. When you get to the last half-inch, stop and coat the point of the triangle with the glue.

Step 5: Finish rolling up the paper. Make sure the pointy end of the triangle is securely glued down-add a little bit of extra glue if needed.

Step 6: Slide the bead off of the toothpick.  Repeat these steps with the remaining strips of paper.

Step 7: When the beads are dry, you can string them onto a necklace or a bracelet. If you like, you can also decorate them with Mod Podge, paint, glitter or even use UTEE embossing powders for a pearlescent or metallic finish.

That’s all there is to it! You can wear your creations yourself, or give them away to friends and family. Some people even make  jewelry from paper beads and sell it. These are the basic instructions, but there are a lot of different variations. Don’t be afraid to experiment: cut the catalog pages into different sizes and shapes, try different decorations, etc. After all, it’s only junk mail!

Need some inspiration? Take a look at these websites to see what other people have made from their junk mail:

Junk Mail Gems

Paper Bead Safety Pin Bracelet

BirdsandBeadz’ Etsy Shop

EarthHelpCrafts’ Etsy Shop

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:

1. Designing the letter and envelope.
2. Manufacturing the paper.
3. Printing/producing the letter.
4. Sending it out in the mail.
5. The victim, I mean the “consumer,” receives the junk mail.
6. 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.

Image Source

We often conjure an image in our mind of the iconic forests being the great redwoods of the Pacific Northwest or the lush tropical rainforests of the Amazon, but how often do we take a moment to ponder the forests of the Southern US?

From the cypress swamps, pine bogs and pocosins of the Middle Atlantic and Gulf coasts to the mixed pine-oak and hardwood forests of the Piedmont and Cumberland Plateau to the rich and diverse landscapes of the Appalachians and Ozarks, Southern forests are places of amazing natural beauty. Our forests are home to more plants and wildlife than any other region in North America and in the case of freshwater aquatic diversity, more than anywhere else in the world.

Southern forests provide an amazing array of resources that are integral to both our quality of life and are an essential part of our cultural heritage. Millions of people in the South rely on clean drinking water from our forested watersheds. We all rely on clean and healthy air to breathe. Our forests act as important air filters and also play a very important role in moderating climate and preventing flooding.

So why is it that we continue to destroy and degrade these forests, rather than cherish and restore them?  The Southern US is the largest paper producing region in the world, producing approximately 20% of the world’s paper. Packaging is the number one paper product produced in the region, but high on the list are two essential components of junk mail – copy paper and envelopes.  So not only are our forests being destroyed to make paper packaging that is used once and thrown away, they are being trashed for millions of tons of unwanted and unread junk mail every year.

Here are two examples that are worth noting the next time you open your mailbox and pull out a stack of junk mail:

First look at that envelope, there is a good chance that it is a credit card offer or life insurance deal that originated in our Southern forests. Perhaps it came from Franklin, Virginia at the International Paper mill.  Franklin is a short distance from the Great Dismal Swamp – one of our coastal treasures home to unique turtles, one of the few remaining refuges for endangered forest communities like the Atlantic White Cedar, and a hot spot for over 200 migratory bird species including 96 which nest there.  It is also a cultural treasure, a place where many runaway slaves found respite and cover in their incredible journey to freedom in the North.

Next, let’s take a closer look at that piece of paper inside that you will probably never read.  There is a good chance that it also originated in the southern U.S. Maybe it came from the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee or Northern Alabama. National and state authorities have recognized the plateau serves as the South’s most ecologically diverse region and it has also been designated a U.S. BioGem by the Nature Conservancy and NRDC for this very reason.  The Cumberland Plateau region hosts the richest concentration of salamanders, including the endangered green salamander, of any temperate zone in the world.  Additionally, each spring, millions of birds migrating northward from South America or the Caribbean descend on the forests of the Cumberland Plateau before pushing on to Canada’s boreal forest.

So next time you receive junk mail, take a moment to consider the nearly 100 million trees that are cut down every year to produce all of the junk mail in the US and what that means for Southern forests and wildlife.  We know our lives would be simpler without junk mail and it seems pretty clear the environment would be in better shape too!

For more information on Southern forests and the work of the Dogwood Alliance, an organization working to end the destructive practices that paper industry has on those forests, visit: www.dogwoodalliance.org.

About the Author:
Scot Quaranda is the Campaign Director at Dogwood Alliance, the only organization holding corporations accountable for their forestry practices in the Southern US.  For more information, visit: www.dogwoodalliance.org

(Note: click on chart for larger version)

This past summer, Unjunk Mail’s research team did its best to analyze all of the services out there that help consumers stop receiving direct mail.

We signed up for the Do Not Mail lists you can join for free and reviewed the services that charge fees. We found that some of the tools are easy to use while others were more time-consuming: they demanded lots of personal information and had clunky interfaces. However,  the services that ask for more information often provide consumers more control over what flows into their mailboxes. So if you really want to battle the junk in your box, you need to be willing to invest a little time in the fight.

In order to determine effectiveness, we read user comments, researched the services’ sponsors, and compared their approaches. But determining effectiveness is an imperfect science. Right now, there isn’t one perfect solution that will stop all direct mail. And it can take months for your do not mail preferences to start working. If any of you have used these services over a long period of time, please share your experience with us in the comment section.

This chart aims to provide a starting place for consumers to compare the Do Not Mail services out there and to talk about which services have worked for them, and which services have not. This research served as the foundation of our Unjunk Mail filter on the right, which features our three favorite free unjunk services.

And again please let us know if you agree, disagree, or have more to add to our ratings and reviews of these junk mail services. We’re all in this together.

Thanks,

the Unjunk Mail team

Note: This post was revised and updated on 09.11.09. The chart was re-organized to better represent the differences in types of do not mail services and lists and to reflect additional research.

The boreal forest is important for a number of reasons. First, it is a natural carbon sink. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, “the thick layers of moss, soil and peat of the boreal are the world’s largest terrestrial storehouse of organic carbon and play an enormous role in regulating the Earth’s climate.” That’s not all-the boreal is forest is one of the few relatively undisturbed forest ecosystems left on the plant, and an amazing variety of plants, animals and First Nations people call it home. Let’s take a look at some of the inhabitants:

Plants

The boreal forest is made up mainly of conifers, including larch, spruce, fir and pine. A few hardwood species such as willow and mountain ash are scattered throughout. Underneath, ferns jostle for space with wild flowers, including the rare lady’s slipper orchid.

Animals

The trees shelter rare animals such as the wood bison, which is only found here. Wood bison are usually larger than plains bison and lack hair on their forelegs. The rare woodland caribou is also found in the boreal forest. It lives mainly off of lichen. According to Defenders of Wildlife, lichen grows slowly, and it can take a patch of forest 80 to 150 years to be able to grow enough of it to support caribou.

In Newfoundland, the boreal forest supports the last few Newfoundland pine martens. Only about 300 are left. Lynx, wolves and deer also call the forest home. Many of the songbirds you hear outside your window raise their young in Canada’s boreal forest-according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, 30 percent of North American songbirds raise their young here, as do 40 percent of North American migratory waterbirds.

Threats

Each year, about one percent of the boreal forest is destroyed, according to Nature.org. US demand for wood products, including newsprint and catalog paper used to send junk mail, incites logging companies to clear-cut large stretches of the forest. In fact, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, 80% of Canada’s forest products go to the US.

It’s hard to say what percentage of junk mail comes from the boreal forest, but really, even one piece should be too much. The only more pointless waste of trees from an ancient wilderness that I can think of is toilet paper, and yes, that happens too.

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.

Photo Credit

1. Shred your junk mail and use it as packing material: What could possibly be more evil than junk mail? Styrofoam packing peanuts! They never break down, and even the slightest breeze sends them flying everywhere. Shredded junk mail is a much less messy, more eco-friendly solution.

2. Bedding for small animals: Gerbils, hamsters and other rodents love nothing more than to shred pieces of paper into a nice, cozy bed. Toss them your junk mail, and you’ll make their day. Remember to remove the plastic windows from envelopes before you toss them in the cage. Also, don’t give them junk mail printed on glossy colored paper, as the ink may be toxic.

3. Make your own cat litter: These instructions are for newspaper waste, but if you are feeling particularly industrious and have a backlog of junk mail to get rid of, you could try making your own eco-friendly kitty litter. Most cat litter is made from strip-mined clay, so making your own from junk mail is a far greener choice. Plus, you definitely won’t have to worry about identity thieves stealing your personal information from your junk mail after your cat gets through with it!

4. Mulch your garden: A good, thick layer of mulch keeps weeds down and conserves water in your garden. Shredded junk mail makes excellent mulch. It attracts beneficial earthworms, and over time, it breaks down and enriches the soil. For the sake of aesthetics, you’ll probably want to put a layer of regular mulch on top, but using junk mail for the bottom layers cuts down on the number of bags you’ll have to buy from the garden center.

5. Make Wrapping Paper or Gift Bags: No money to burn on wrapping paper or gift bags this year?  Get creative with your junk mail instead! You’ll need white glue, scissors, some colorful, seasonally appropriate junk mail and plain brown paper sacks. Wrap or bag your gift, then decorate the packaging as you see fit.

These ideas are all practical ways to reuse your junk mail. They’re good for the environment, and they might even save you a little bit of money. But you know what’s even better than reusing your junk mail? Not getting any junk mail at all! That’s why Unjunk Mail made it easy to apply to the three most effective Do-Not-Mail lists, all at the same time. To unjunk your mailbox, just click on the link to the right!

About the Author

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.

Then something happened. It disappeared.

While there remains a lot of related content and releases of Andy’s aggression on the topic, there is only trace evidence of his suggestions and the segment itself. A blog post re-circulating his recommendations was posted as well as an apparent transcript of what was said. There is even a post discrediting the advice given. But we have been robbed of the call to arms from as powerful a pulpit as 60 Minutes begging the question, “What happened?”

We still have a segment on the junk mail you can discard without opening. We still have his rantings against zip codes and state abbreviations and the another on the number of catalogs we all get at Christmas. And he has even shown transparency by reading from his own mailbag of angry fan mail he has received and junk gifts from fans that annoy him. CBS has left all of those intact.

But the only advice he has espoused about action to take directly against the marketers who send junk mail indiscriminately has gone away. We will forever be robbed of our [potential] Patron Saints’ thoughts. Take some solace in an apparent transcript of the segment.

But hurry before CBS finds out!!!