Unsolicited mail -- Read 3412 times

It never ceases to amaze me the amount of paper (and chemicals, dyes, inks used) that is wasted on the advertisements and junk-mail that is delivered to letter boxes everywhere.

In an average week, I will receive a full shopping bag full of ads. I am now getting a no-junk-mail sign for my letter box as this level of paper and resource wastage is, to me, unacceptable. It raises an interesting point, an irony or contradiction in legislation. SPAM (the mass-mailing of advertisements electronically to an arbitrary number of recipients) is illegal in many countries. The resources that e-mail spam wastes,  bandwidth (it is estimated that at any given time 30% of the entire available bandwidth on the internet is being taken by spam messages), is sustainable. The backbones that carry information via electrical signals will always be there, the space that it takes on internet post offices and end-user computers is quite easily found again by deleting the message yet for the 'time' it takes us to clear our inbox of these nuisances we have considered it more 'polluting' than the millions and millions of tonnes of landfill that unsolicited snail-mail takes.

Paper junk mail wastes paper, adds chemicals to waterways and literally is taking up space in dumps that are already nearing capacity. Unlike the few kilobytes of hard drive capacity that can easily be retrieved, a landfill will never be the same again. More than likely, the landfill will become another speedway for hot-heads to drive their fuel guzzling sprint cars and add to global warming.

This is my idea, I want to have people take notice of how much a bigger threat to the world paper junk mail is. I would like a politician somewhere to see this and ban advertisement drops from their council area. The internet is the greatest source of information that the human race has ever seen and it is only getting bigger. Companies should cease their mail drops and focus their energy into internet advertising.

Who would like to join me in removing ads from the letter box?



Please download one of the file formats below and send it to your local member to stop junk mail