FoxNews.com -- Pitching all that pesky- and wasteful- junk mail
,March 25th, 2009
Each afternoon, I greet the arrival of the day’s mail in the steel “U.S. Mail” slot on my house’s front porch with ambivalence.
On the one hand, I subscribe to a spate of different politics and culture magazines, one or two of which usually arrive each day much to my glee.
On the other hand, crammed into the mail slot with those magazines and the rest of the day’s mail are reams and reams of junk mail — coupons, Pottery Barn catalogs I don’t want, credit card applications, etc. — practically bursting out of the mail slot.
Junk mail, that plague of unwanted and wasted advertisements and catalogs, might seem like a minor inconvenience to you and me. But according to a report issued by ForestEthics, a nonprofit environmental group that tries to protect endangered forest, found that more than 100 billion pieces of junk mail are delivered in the U.S. each year — an average of 848 pieces per household.
The ForestEthics report goes on to conclude that the production, distribution and disposal of those 100 billion pieces of junk mail generates more than 51 million metric tons of greenhouse gases each year. That’s the equivalent annual emissions, the report says, of 9.3 million passenger cars, 11 coal-fired power plants or 12.9 million homes.