Junk mail, no thanks

Forest and Bird, Issue 279, 1 February 1996, Page 6

Junk mail, no thanks

JIMMY McGUINESS doesn’t like junk mail, but that didn’t stop him from collecting every piece of unsolicited advertising material pushed into his Hutt Valley letter box in 1995. By the end of the year he had collected 1,664 items, an average of almost five every day. Put into one pile, the brochures, circulars, coupon booklets and samples reach over one and a half metres high. He sees it all as waste: "Most of them are selling the same things; it doesn’t make me want to buy any of it and all it does is clog up the letterbox." If junk mail bothers you, get a Forest and Bird "No junk mail" sticker. It won’t stop all unsolicited mail but it will help. Remember that New Zealand uses over half a million tonnes A

of paper products a year, only a quarter of which is recycled. And this is only a minuscule proportion of the four billion trees consumed annually to feed the world’s voracious appetite for paper. Much of this is from the world’s dwindling estate of natural forest and not only removes trees but destroys the habitats of hundreds of species of plants and animals in the process. The demand for paper products is increasing faster than population growth and is expected to double by 2010.