Wednesday is Earth Day and maybe stopping junk mail would be a good place to start if we're going to save the planet.
Did you know the average American household gets 848 pieces of junk mail every year? Multiplied by 120 million American families --that's more than 101 billion pieces of unwanted mail sent each year.
Earth Day is a perfect time to consider the devastating environmental impact of all that wasted paper.
Here's some more information from
www.proquo.com, an organization that can help consumers eliminate up to 90 percent of their postal junk mail, with just a few clicks of the mouse:
- The average person receives 40-60 pounds of junk mail annually---totaling 6.5 million tons of junk mail each year.
- More than 28 billion gallons of water are wasted to produce and recycle junk each year.
- The production and disposal of junk mail consumes more energy than three million cars.
- 100 million trees are used to produce junk mail each year.
- 44% of mail goes into landfills unopened.
- The manufacture of junk mail releases more greenhouse gas emissions per year than the emissions released by 9,372,000 average passenger cars.
Those figures certainly give us some things to think about this Earth Day.
