What do you do with all that junk mail you get in the post? Do you bin it (tut tut!) without opening it? Do you recycle it to avoid sending more waste to the landfill? Or do you return it to the sender – and hope they recycle it – with a note on the envelope asking to be removed from their mailing-list.
I do the latter and it usually works. A polite note on the envelope stating that the mail is ‘unwanted’ and instructing the postal service to return it to the sender (at the sender’s expense) is my preferred way of dealing with it and, it has to be said, I don’t tend to get much.
Junk Mail Revenge Day
This Saturday, 15th November, is Junk Mail Revenge Day! The idea is that you save up all the junk mail you get through your letterbox this week and post it all back to the senders by dropping it in the nearest pillar box on Saturday.
Hopefully, the senders of the junk mail, who have to pay the postage on mail which is returned, will be inundated with all the unwanted items and will pay the price for sending it in the first place! Hitting them where it hurts – on the balance sheet – might make them rethink their strategy. If we all did it, all the time, they’d soon get the message and the junk mail would stop!
Some junk mail facts
- 650 pieces of junk mail are posted through the average British letterbox every year.
- DEFRA estimates that junk mail makes up nearly 2% of all household waste.
- Postcomm has estimated that around 550,000 tonnes of paper is used to produce 17.5 billion pieces of junk mail sent out every year.
- The 4.5 billion pieces of addressed junk mail use 181.5 tonnes of paper, while 368,500 tonnes of paper is needed to produce the 13 billion pieces of unaddressed junk mail.
- 550,000 tonnes of paper amounts to 4.4% of UK’s annual consumption of paper and board.
- It takes about 17 mature trees to produce a tonne of paper. The equivalent of 550,000 tonnes of paper is therefore 9.35 million trees.
- It not only takes a lot of trees to produce junk mail, it also takes a lot of water. In fact, 16.5 billion litres of water is used for the production of junk mail in Britain every year.
Stop junk mail now!
As well as returning junk mail to the sender (at their expense, don’t forget – no need for a stamp) there are a number of things you can do to stop the junk mail you receive, such as registering with the Mailing Preference Service (in the UK).
Go to the Stop Junk Mail website for more information. And read our article on how to stop your bills by switching to paper-free, or paperless, billing to further reduce the amount of paper you get through your letterbox.
Free content for your blog!
You are free, and encouraged, to reuse and recycle the contents of this article under a Creative Commons license providing you give us credit and link (pingback) to this article using the full title and URL. Images may have a different license – please check the original(s) on Flickr.
No recommended reading.
4 comments… read them below or add yours now
I like the idea of a Junk Mail Revenge day!!! I wish everyone in the country would do it and then it would stop. We usually recycle any junk mail we get but it’s not much cos we’re signed up with the MPS. Sending it back is a good idea then they’ll know not to send you any more.
Yeah, always return to sender to make ‘em pay and they’ll soon remove your details from their list :)
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.
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.
@Tim: Welcome to Green Pepper and thanks for joining the discussion. Glad to hear that you’re helping others to reduce the junk mail they receive.
I should point out that we ‘nofollow’ links posted in comments (until we establish who are genuine friends with something to offer our community) so linking to your site here won’t improve your PR but might be of benefit to other readers who are interested in your service.