Junk Mail and the Environment

As you probably know, our first mission at greendimes is to free us all from the shackles of junk mail. But why? What is it about junk mail that gets us fired up all of a sudden, after years of just being annoyed?

Well, we’re hearing more and more these days about the environment, waste and global warming, and we noticed how much junk mail waste is in our homes. Then we thought, “Wait. It’s not just our homes. It’s everyone’s. And its wasting paper and water and energy and money." So we looked into the junk mail business and were dismayed by the magnitude of the issue.

100,000,000 million trees cut down every year.  28,000,000,000 gallons of wasted water.  For stuff nobody wants!

If we were lucky, junk mail’s impact would stop when it goes into the landfill. But actually landfills spew out methane, another global warming gas and waste paper is responsible for most of that methane. Up to 50% of landfills is wood and paper products, which means we’re chopping down trees to make space for processed, trashed trees. The burden of all this waste falls on our cities, which spend more than $370 million a year just to handle junk mail.

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Comments

[Tom Hanna]

You realize that 100,000,000 million trees a year is 16,666.6667 trees per person on the planet? Even assuming anyone would go to the trouble of sending junk mail to infants in Biafra, I doubt that they send nearly 17,000 trees a year worth. I suspect the number you were going for was 100 million not 100 million-million.