Junk Mail - just how “heavy” a problem is it?
Junk Mail - we all get it and we all hate it. It’s a marketing fact of life that we can’t stop. Sure, we can reduce it a smidgeon by subscribing to opt out lists, but most of them are guidelines that are ignored. Even the USPS delivers junk right into your mailbox, and you can’t opt out of that either.
So I set out to discover just how big a problem it is. Two adults live in our house and so for exactly 1 month I collected every piece of unsolicited mail. I tried to be fair. Anything we requested or were a member of, I didn’t count. E.g.: If my book club sent me twenty flyers for books I didn’t want, I didn’t label that junk mail. After all, it was my decision to be a member of the club. On the flip side, if my credit card company sent me mortgage offers then that IS junk - I didn’t ask for a mortgage offer.
So here’s the results of 1 month junk mail for 2 people:
As you can see even Pippin the cat was amazed at the amount.
Then I decided to weigh all that junk mail. It came to a hefty 14 lbs, or 7 lbs per person, for 1 month. Then I got really interested: According to the US Census Bureau Projections, in 2005 there are about 214 million adults in the USA. To arrive at this figure, I totalled all adults aged 20+ and averaged the 2000 and 2010 columns. Certainly the very advanced seniors (say 80+) will not receive so much junk mail as the average adult, but then I figured that was compensated for by the ommission of ages 15-19, who probably do receive junk mail.
So the calculations ran as follows:
214 million adults @ 7 lbs junk mail = 1,495,000,000 lbs, or 1.5 billion lbs per month!
Since there are 2000 lbs in a ton, that’s 747,000 tons per month.
That creates a grand total of 8,973,000 tons per year, or 9 million tons of junk mail per year!
I’m sure not all of that paper is recycled either, since I know that glossy paper is tough to recycle. What an incredible waste of time, money and trees for material that people probably aren’t even looking at, let alone acting upon. This cannot be an effective way to market products! Come on businesses, lets be smart and find another way?
February 22nd, 2006 at 9:15 am
This is what conservatree.com says “based on a mixture of softwoods and hardwoods 40 feet tall and 6-8 inches in diameter, it would take a rough average of 24 trees to produce a ton of printing and writing paper.” So…according your findings…9 million tons of junk mail a year, respresents about 216 million trees used just for junk mail. Yikes! According to the USFS, a very dense, mature (20 years - 8 inch diameter - 58 feet tall) pine plantation in the southeast has a density of 520 trees/acre. So…(216 million trees)/(520 trees/acre) = (roughly) 415,385 acres. Double yikes!! The state of Rhode Island consists of approximately 668,800 acres (1045 square miles); every year we cut down about 2/3 the state of Rhode Island in trees just for junk mail? Triple yikes!!!
(This is an extremely rough estimate based on a VERY dense tree plantation. The *real* number of acres is likely higher. Also, some of this mail likely contains some % of “post-consumer fibers” i.e. recycled paper. Whatever percent that is (30 maybe?) we can reduce the final number by that amount. Still…yikes.)
February 22nd, 2006 at 9:08 pm
Wow! That was some scarey research Joel. Thanks for that. This is a serious problem that I am very surprised no one is bringing to the nation’s attention. Animal charities are everywhere but where are the tree-hugger ones? As a society we really need to rethink the way we market our products and services. Junk mail, whether material or electronic is far too primitive.