Why You Should Recycle & Reduce Your Junk Mail

We all get junk mail, both as businesses and as individuals. Most of the time we ignore it. We glance at it, see it isn’t something we need, and toss it right in the trash. However, that kind of behavior is having a negative effect on the environment. Because you see, the process of just making junk mail pumps over 50 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere (which, according to Cracked, is enough to heat 13 million homes through the winter). As if that wasn’t bad enough, though, three-quarters of junk mail will wind up in landfills.

Only half of it is even opened. To make matters worse, though, there are all the emissions released into the atmosphere that comes from postal workers delivering this mail no one is reading. Taken as a whole, junk mail is one of the biggest, most damaging threats to the environment that none of us ever think about.

Fortunately for all of us, junk mail is easy to recycle. Since it’s just paper, all you have to do is toss it right into the blue recycle bin. Just put it out on the corner on collection day, and you’ve done your duty keeping your junk mail out of a landfill.

But what about the rest of it? What about all the energy and pollution that comes from making it, to delivering it? If you want to do your part to stop that part of the process, then you need to find out where your junk mail is coming from, contact them, and get taken off their list. Once you send the message that you don’t want to receive this junk anymore, that’s one less piece that will be produced. If enough people take that step, it can result in a big drop in the unwanted mail we all receive.