The junk mail we receive at home is garbage-in-garbage-out, since we don’t read it at all, including various weekly newspapers. When I think of the energy and forest resources used for absolutely no reason, I get kind of ticked off. When going to the skytrain or bus loop, ever had someone thrust a paper in your face? The papers might get read while on the train but often get left as trash on sidewalks or on buses and trains. Paper junk mail seems like a gigantic waste.
However, as we’ve noticed everywhere we have lived in the lower mainland–from Burnaby to Port Moody to Coquitlam–junk mail advertisements and weekly papers are delivered on an opt-out basis. You will automatically get a pile of junk each week, whether or not you asked for it or like it. It’s a special prize just for living at a residence.
I can’t help think of this model of consumerism: refuse, reuse, reduce, recycle. In that order. I’m at number one here: I wanted to refuse mail I never asked to receive.
When we moved to Coquitlam last year, the amount of newspapers we got delivered to our porch was annoying, but we decided to keep the newspapers at least for a while, for helping to build fires in the winter. I began to stuff newspapers in an out-of-the-way kitchen cabinet, but by spring, the cabinet had long been full and we’d used hardly any of the paper saved. So we began recycling it. Our recycling day is Thursday. I recall on Wednesdays, coming home from work to retrieve another stack of classifieds, only to directly put them in our paper recycling bag for next day pickup. The whole process was entirely ridiculous.
I bought a “No Junk Mail” sign and stuck it on our mailbox. It’s in plain sight. But both the post office and newspaper deliveries ignored my sign. We continued to get junk mail.
I researched a little online about how to stop junk mail and found out that the Canada Post will stop sending most admail if you request it. Supposedly they will abide by a “No Junk Mail” sign, but that didn’t happen. After I called, however, they stopped delivering admail. They say that some admail cannot be stopped, however, such as political mail.
Our “No Junk Mail” sign did not stop those pesky free newspapers either. One day we received a letter addressed to a previous tenant in the house. We marked the letter “Return to Sender” and stuck it on the lower portion of our mailbox, which holds mail, hoping that our letter carrier would see it and pick it up the next day. The next morning, beneath our “No Junk Mail” sign, the rack was stuffed with newspaper advertisements, and whoever had delivered them had thrown the Return to Sender letter on our porch.
We were getting The Now News, Tricities News, and a few other unwanted papers each week. I wanted to figure out how to stop these deliveries and did an online search, leading to the
Red Dot Campaign. I am not sure if that campaign still exists. The website is still up, but their latest news is from 2009 and nobody from the organization returned an email when I wrote to see if they were still active. I kind of came to a dead end when finding some help.
So, every time we got a newspaper on our porch or in rack below our mailbox, I called the paper to opt out of delivery. This took a while since we received so many different papers.
After several weeks, our unwanted ad-paper delivery seemed to stop! Then yesterday we arrived home to see Coquitlam Now, a Glacier Media publication, on our porch. I had called them two weeks ago to stop the paper. And I called a second time this morning to remind them that we do not want that paper. We’ll see if they stop delivering.
I learned from the Red Dot Campaign that:
A recent Canadian Marketing Study quoted in the
Flyer Distribution Standards Association newsletter suggests that :
67% of Canadians are not interested in flyers and advertising that comes in the mail.
25% of Canadians discard them without reading.
But most people don’t try to stop the junk mail. According to
CBC, back when the Red Dot Campaign was in full swing:
Despite the fact that Canada Post has offered the opt-out program for more than 10 years, the corporation says only two per cent of Canadians use it. [from 2008]
One unnerved junk-mail recipient says to
just send it back.
According to
The Star, back when the Red Dot Campaign was active, Canada Post spokeswoman Lillian Au said that the campaign was unnecessary since Canada Post had had the opt-out option for years. Since 2% of Canadians (out of 67% who are uninterested) do anything about stopping junk mail, it seems to me a campaign is needed for awareness purposes.
According to the Star article linked above:
Au acknowledged that unaddressed advertising mail is one of Canada Post’s fastest growing revenue streams – it brought in $339 million in 2006, up 14.4 per cent from 2005 – and helps keep costs down for consumers, while allowing small businesses to advertise in an affordable way.
Almost all of the promotional mail is recyclable and printed on recycled paper, she added.
I cannot find any source to back up how many flyers and other ad material is really recycled. Companies who make the ads will make those decisions, and that statistic is not cited. Also, if up to 67% of Canadians aren’t interested in junk mail, just how effective is that advertising? 100% ineffective from the 25% of people just throwing out the paper, that’s for sure!
Regardless, junk mail takes energy to produce, even if it is recycled or recyclable. Unwanted and unused products waste 100% of the forest resource (even if a byproduct), other energy resources, shipping, mailing, printing, and either secondary recycling processes or landfill space–simply due to the fact that none of that energy is ever consumed in the end.
As for helping small businesses grow and continued revenue for Canada Post, I’m all for that. But unsolicited paper mail is an old industry that needs to be phased out due to its environmental impact. Advertising has gone digital now, and due to smarter search engines like Google, advertising is more direct, aligning with consumers’ personal interests. What’s more, the same papers getting delivered and thrown out or recycled in the lower mainland are also online, so if someone really wanted to read them, they could go online to do so.
There are still many issues surrounding electronic junk mail, but with anti-spam tools, you most likely do not ever have to deal with e-mail junk mail and can just ignore ads that pop up in searches, if you want. Of course, some ads might be of interest, and that’s the beauty of smart advertising. The bottom line is: zero waste, zero trees cut down.
Back to the viability and environmental impact of printed newspapers:
According to
Pulp and Paper Products Canada:
A large portion of the newsprint produced worldwide is based on mechanical pulp (a by-product fibre, which remains after sawmills have optimized the cutting of logs into lumber) and increasing amounts are made, partly or entirely, from recovered fibre, such as old newspapers and old magazines. Depending on the type of mechanical pulp used, some chemical pulp may be added to strengthen the sheet. However, according to Wikipedia:
In the US, the
Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 44% of junk mail is discarded without being opened or read, equalling four million tons of waste paper per year,
[28] with 32% recovered for recycling.
[29] Further, the Ohio Office of Compliance Assistance and Pollution Prevention (OCAPP) estimates that 250,000 homes could be heated for a single day’s junk mail (70,000,000,000,000/3 btus of energy or 28,870,000,000/21 kwh of energy).
[30] The CO2 emissions from 41 pounds of advertising mail received annually by the average US consumer is about 47.6 kilograms (105 pounds) according to one study.
[33] The loss of natural habitat potential from the 41 pounds of advertising mail is estimated to be 36.6 square metres (396 square feet).
[34] Mike Berners-Lee estimates that receiving five letters per day plus two printed catalogs per week results in 480 kilograms (1,100 lb)
CO2e per year. This same boreal forest being logged for junk mail fiber is also being logged to make room for increased
oil sands mining.
How to stop unwanted waste delivered to your porch?
1. Call the Canada Post to request no more junk mail:
1-866-607-6301.
2. Adhere a “No Junk Mail” sign to your mailbox.
Stop unwanted newspapers by calling them directly. It’s a tedious job, but someone has to do it, and because many of these papers are opt-out, you are the only one who can take action. See a listing of newspapers here:
Open Directory.
