My second week in this adventure is drawing to a close and I must admit that I have been learning quite a bit this week. The challenge for the week is to stop junk mail from coming to our house. In this process, I have learned just how wasteful we are in regards to junk mail and also some things we can do to help reduce the problem.
This has now been repeated here several times, but over 100 million trees are cut down every year for junk mail. I can’t get over that. I cannot even begin to imagine what 100 million trees looks like. Beyond that, about 40% of junk mail goes into the trash unopened. Does that mean that 40 million trees go straight from the paper mill to the land fill? To me, it is one thing to be wasteful in the process of doing something, but this is a kind of collective wastefulness is just plain’ old wrong.
This is the kind of waste that I (as a person new to the green culture) just had no idea about. Well, the end of the line has come for this guy. I have already began the process of making sure I can reduce my impact on these rediculous statistics and hope that I will be able to stop or reuse as much junk mail as possible. What do you do with your junk mail?
So far, I keep all of my junk mail that I get. I don’t know why either because the pile just keeps on getting higher and higher. You can also call places like credit card companies if you have a re-occurring monthly bill and just make payments online. Do you know what I can do with all of my Rachel Ray magazines that I don’t read anymore?? Is there a place in town where I can take these? The recycling place near us doesn’t have a bin for those.
Jenna, you could donate them, let some else you know read these magazines so they will get more use. Most recycling centers do take magazines. However, you can’t recycle the big JCPenney holiday catalogs though.