100 Million Trees Are Cut Each Year to Generate Junk Mail
A report by ForestEthics, the nonprofit environmental organization whose mission is to protect endangered forests, has made a very startling revelation: that there are 100 million green reasons why junk mail are an annoying intrusion.
Not that the 100 billion pieces of junk mail Americans receive each year are irksome enough or that the emissions of junk mail are equal to those of over nine million cars or 51 million tons of greenhouse gases.
The group estimates that every year, more than 100 million trees are cut down to make junk mail – the equivalent of clear-cutting all of Rocky Mountain National Park every 4 months!
According to the report (PDF), those trees come from endangered forests like Canada’s Boreal, the forests of the Southeastern United States, Indonesia and northern Europe, as well as smaller areas of rare or disappearing forest ecosystems in the Western United States, Brazil, Chile, and Russia.
In the Boreal alone, the equivalent of over 220,000 acres of forest are destroyed every year to make junk mail in the United States. ForestEthics statistics show that US junk mail makes up almost 10% of all the timber harvested in the Canadian Boreal, by volume as well as by
harvest area.
The report which attempts to assess junk mail effects on global warming features a myth and fact section that debunks alleged misinformation spread in the wake of ForestEthics’ Do Not Mail campaign.
Jim Ford, the report’s author, said: “Junk mail has implications for climate change that start in the forest, continue through paper production, printing and distribution, and end with recycling or landfilling.”
Image credit: Tanya Ryno at Flickr under a Creative Commons license
Awesome! I signed the petition at donotmail.org
Another thing I learned awhile back about junk mail is that without it, the USPS would go out of business. They can’t sustain their business model without bulk mailing. That’s not a justification by any means, just an interesting quandary. If the USPS went away, would we then have to use services like UPS to send our regular mail?
Wow, that is a LOT of wasted trees every year! Sad!
http://useurl.us/126
Where do they get the figure of 100 million trees cut each year for junk mail? I don’t see it footnoted or explained in their pdf. I know that alot of the emissions happen during the processing of the trees into junk mail and then delivery. I seems to me that the entire argument is undercut if the 100 million figure isn’t explained.
Wow, yet another reason to hate junk mail (like we needed one). I can’t imagine the fuel (for shipping) and electricity (for production) that could also be saved if this garbage was cut out of our daily lives.
My pet peeve is the lack of choice on receiving phone books. THREE deliveries this year & of course when I call to complain they ignore me as I try to explain that I did NOT ask to opt in.
Well, all I can do is hope Obama / Biden will halt cooperate abuses like this while insuring descent affordable, net neutral digital access for all, so I can enjoy the 21 st century pleasures like goog411…
Bill
Mead Wa USA Earth
well since paper in the U.S. is made from tree farms that just means 100 million or so trees are planted and another 100 million are cut down each year.
I am missing something? This article doesn’t explain how spam translates into trees being cut down! Emissions yes I get it but trees? What is everyone printing their spam email?
Please explain…
Doh! My wife just explained Junk ‘Snail’ Mail. Wow that’s bad!
@ke – did you even look at the photo at the top of this article? showing a snailmailbox?
I must get at least three credit card offers per week or more at times. Some weeks the only mail I get is all junk mail.What a waste!
Without junk mail, the USPS has significant problems. If we require junk mail to be made from 100% recycled material, the trees are saved and the USPS stats in business. In addition, it would create a strong demand for recycled paper products.
I always found it funny that when you bank with an institution they have somewhere on your monthly statement that you should switch to paper billing because it saves x amount of trees a year. But the same institution will send me 20 credit offers a year!
I work in the web printing industry and produce some junk mail – the majority of our paper comes from europe and is produced from plantation timber which is a renewable source.
A lot of our customers are concerned with the source of the timber for the paper and we now have a program called chain of custody to verify the source of the timber/paper to our clients.
We also use some recycled paper stocks but most of the recycled paper but the quality is poor so it mostly goes into cardboard as far as i am aware.
http://officeofstrategicinfluence.com/bulkmailer/
Check out the preceding website. Apparently, you can tape those postage-paid return envelopes and tape them to bricks, and mail them back to the company. It costs them about twenty-five bucks per brick. Pretty nifty, eh?
Yeah I really hate receiving phone books as well. I probably used one twice in the last 4 years. What a waste!
Oh my God! I didn’t thought about this. 100 Million Trees are just too much!
Thats Prety bad! I hate junk mail.
I’m so sick of junk mail, I could scream. During the average week I get maybe, 5 pieces of real mail as I have tried to go paperless with most of my accounts. However, I get over 100 pieces of junk mail a week. Not only are they killing trees for this, it uses more petrol to carry it to my mail box, I use electricity to shread all the pieces with my address on them, and then I have to use petrol taking it all to the recycling center! I’ve even tried requesting companies cease sending me catalogs but they won’t stop. Why can’t they just send me an email to tell me they are having a sale? Kudos to Lowe’s, Sears, and Home Depot who have stopped sending hard copy flyers to me and send emails instead.
I happen to be one of the owners of MyJunkTree and as a new company I search the web to see if we are getting any visibility out there and I post n relevant Blogs.
We launched the company because we were tired of all the junk mail we were receiving and we personally did not want to bounce all over the web to contact all the different companies to stop it all. First and foremost we wanted to let people choose what they wanted to let come to their home knowing that some people really do like some of the coupons and catalogs. So our clients choose what they want stopped.
We also had to provide a service that is different than the other services out there, so here is what we offer:
1. We have a database of over 1300 catalogs that you can choose to stop.
2. We have over a 4000 charities/Non-Profits that you can stop solicitations from.
3. Stop the delivery of the national phone directories.
4. Stop the delivery of the weekly coupons.
5. Stop the general credit card offers as well as the ones from your own major bank.
6. Stop the miscellaneous junk mail from the data brokers.
7. You can register on the National Do Not Call Registry from the website.
8. You can order your no strings attached free annual credit report right from the website.
9. We plant trees with every new membership.
And, yes we are a paid service and yes you can do everything that we do for free, if you want to do all the research and spend the time contacting the companies yourself it can easily be done. We have just done all of the legwork for our clients and feel there is value in the service we provide. So check out MyJunkTree and make difference in your mailbox.