You’d think with all the advertising and promotions that land in our inboxes, social media feeds, and follow us around the web, less of it would end up in our mailboxes. Even with this shift in advertising the average American mailbox still gets stuffed with almost 850 flyers, catalogs, credit card offers, and sweepstakes postcards every year. And, most of that junk mail ends up getting thrown away, 44% of it unopened.[1]

As annoying as junk mail can be at home, it’s even more annoying for our environment. Each year, hundreds of millions of trees get destroyed and 9 million cars worth of greenhouse gas getting pumped into the atmosphere. [2]

As a resident, it might seem pretty insurmountable to take even a dent out of the 5.6 million tons of junk mail that end up in our landfills every year[3]. After all, most of us don’t even know how we got on these mailing lists to begin with. 

But there are things you can do to significantly cut back on the stream of junk mail that clogs your mailboxes and fills your bins. Head on over to the Junk Mail section of our site to see how you can get your name off mailing lists, cut back on solicitors, and halt those unwanted phone books and catalogs.