The Issues

Corporate junk mailers stuff American mailboxes with more than 1 billion pieces of mail each year.¹ In fact, junk mail in the United States accounts for nearly 30% of all the mail delivered in the world.²

But junk mail does more than simply invade our homes and waste our time. Junk mail also puts us at risk of identity theft, destroys forests, contributes to climate change, and creates more waste for landfills. What’s worse, taxpayers often have to bear the cost to dispose of this garbage while junk mailers often get huge (and sometimes subsidized) discounts to send us more junk.

We need some common sense solutions: let’s take back our mailboxes and change the way these junk mail companies do business.
Tell some of the worst junk mailers that you're sick of their junk mail >>

Junk is annoying, wasteful and invades our privacy

• Junk mail in the U.S. accounts for over 100,000,000,000 pieces of mail each year³—about 30% of all the mail delivered in the world⁴
• Each year American households receive a total of 104.7 billion pieces of junk mail⁵ or 848 pieces of junk mail per household⁶, requiring 6.5 million tons of paper⁷
• The average American will spend 8 months of their lives dealing with junk mail⁸
• Entire households only average 1 personal correspondence each week, compared to almost 18 pieces of junk mail⁹
• In 2005 the United States Postal Service processed more junk mail than First Class Mail for the first time, and our postal service is increasingly oriented toward the delivery of unwanted junk mail¹⁰
• Since 1991, national polls have consistently shown that between 80 to 90% of respondents dislike junk mail and would take some action to reduce it if they could
• In a Zogby International poll, 93% of respondents were aware of the Do Not Call Registry and 89% of them supported a Do Not Mail Registry to make it easier to opt out of unsolicited ad mail¹¹
• A national poll by Zogby International found that 92% of respondents discard or recycle at least some of their junk mail without reading it¹²
  
• Approximately 44% of junk mail goes to landfills unopened¹³
• By the year 2010, almost 50% of the solid mass that makes up our landfills is expected to be paper and paperboard waste¹⁴
• State and local governments and their citizens spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year to collect and dispose of all the bulk mail that does not get recycled. In Seattle, for example, the estimated taxpayer bill for disposing of a year's worth of junk mail comes to around $400,000
• 6.5 million tons of discounted junk mail entered the U.S. municipal solid waste stream in 2006¹⁵
• A response rate of less than 0.25% is considered acceptable for the 500 million U.S. credit card solicitations that are mailed monthly¹⁶

Junk mail destroys the environment

• Read our report, Climate Change Enclosed: Junk Mail's Impact on Global Warming

  It takes more than 100 million trees to produce the total volume of junk mail that arrives in American mailboxes each year—that's the equivalent of clearcutting the entire Rocky Mountain National Park every 4 months¹⁷
• The manufacture of junk mail releases more greenhouse gas emissions per year than the emissions released by 9,372,000 million average passenger cars.¹⁸ Read our full report, Climate Change Enclosed: Junk Mail's Impact on Global Warming.
  
• The Canadian Boreal forms part of the greater Boreal Forest, which stores more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem on earth.¹⁹ Despite this natural ability to protect us from the effects of global warming, the Canadian Boreal is being logged at a rate of 2 acres a minute, 24 hours a day²⁰ to produce junk mail and other paper products.
• Deforestation of Indonesia’s tropical forests is responsible for 8% of global carbon emissions.²¹ This destruction is largely driven by demand for pulp and paper for end uses like junk mail. Logging contributes to Indonesia’s status as the world’s third largest emitter of CO2 into the Earth’s atmosphere, despite its relatively small size.²²
• Both Canada’s Boreal and Indonesia’s tropical forests are home to indigenous communities who depend on the land for hunting, fishing, economic development and cultural activities.
• The Boreal provides critical habitat to caribou and half of North America’s songbird species.²³
• Indonesia is home to 12% of Earth’s mammal species, and 17% of all bird species.²⁴ Many of these, including endangered orangutans and tigers, rely on Indonesia’s rapidly disappearing tropical rainforests for their survival.
  

References

¹United States Postal Service (USPS). "The Household Diary Study: Mail Use & Attitudes in FY2006." March, 2007, pp. 1.
²Ibid, USPS. March, 2007, calculation from pp. 1 & 3.
³Ibid, USPS. March, 2007, pp. 1.
⁴Ibid, USPS. March, 2007, calculation from pp. 1 & 3.
⁵Ibid, USPS. March, 2007, pp. 1.
⁶Ibid, USPS. March, 2007, calculation from pp. 7 and pp. 36.
⁷Abramovitz, Janet. “Junk Mail Research—Report of Initial Findings.” May 24, 2006. Data sources include: USPS Annual Reports, USPS Household Diary Studies, USPS Strategic Transformation Plan, Direct Marketing Association (DMA) Statistical Factbook (various years), DMA Response Rate Report (various years), DMA Economic Impact Report (various years).
⁸Swenson, Richard. Margins: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Americans. Navpress Publishing Group.  March 1995.
⁹Ibid, USPS. March 2007, pp 20 & 37.
¹⁰Ibid, Abramovitz.
¹¹National Poll Commissioned by the Center for a New American Dream and conducted from September 13-16, 2007 by Zogby International. The survey was administered by phone to 1011 likely voters nationwide. Findings from the survey have a margin of error of +/- 3.1%.
¹²Ibid, National Poll Commissioned by the Center for a New American Dream and conducted from September 13-16, 2007 by Zogby International.
¹³41pounds.org: http://41pounds.org/impact/
¹⁴Native Forest Network, http://www.nativeforest.org/stop_junk_mail/nfn_junk_mail_guide.htm.
¹⁵United States Environmental Protection Agency Municipal Solid Waste Report 2006 http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/muncpl/pubs/06data.pdf.
¹⁶DNM news:” Direct mail faces year of reckoning” http://www.dmnews.com/cms/dm-news/print-production/39619.html.
¹⁷Center for a New American Dream calculation from Conservatree and U.S. Forest Service statistics.
¹⁸ForestEthics with Jim Ford of Borealis Centre and Climate for Ideas. Climate Change Enclosed: Junk Mail's Impact on Global Warming. August 2008.
¹⁹ForestEthics. Robbing the Carbon Bank. March 2007.
²⁰Calculation based on statistics from Natural Resources Canada. http://cfs.nrcan.gc.ca.
²¹Delft Hydraulics Peat Study, 2006, p. 3.
²²Ibid, Delft.
²³Heiman, Marilyn. “Destructive logging cuts birds' survival,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 11th, 2005.
²⁴The Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia, embassyofindonesia.org.