Postally speaking, I lead a quiet life. Now and then I get a letter from my parents or a book I’ve ordered. Usually they’re accompanied by a couple items of junk mail. Recently, however, I spiced up my postal life by taking out a NetFlix subscription. Today as I opened my mailbox to retrieve my latest disc (the 1968 version of The Lion in Winter), a pile of junk mail poured out. Having to scoop it up off the ground was a minor annoyance; having to violently jam down the contents of my garbage can to make room for this mail was a more severe annoyance.
Since there were no exceptional pizza coupons in that redwood tree worth of mail, the only positive that I can attribute to the pile of waste is that it impelled me to look up just how many pieces of direct mail are sent out each year. The following is from Time Magazine’s December 15th, 2008 issue:
These days Americans get an average of 18 pieces of junk mail for every personal letter. From catalogs to credit-card solicitations, our mailboxes are increasingly clogged with clutter. Dealing with unwanted mail not only wastes our time (eight months over the average lifespan) but also bears environmental costs. Paper spam eats up an estimated 100 million trees each year, with 44% of junk mail ending up–unopened–in landfills.
Writer Jeremy Caplan goes on to present these statistics:
40 LB. — Weight of junk mail each American gets per year
848 — Pieces of junk mail each household gets per year
89% — Poll respondents who support a Do Not Mail list
30% — Worldwide mail composed of U.S. junk mail
19 BILLION — Number of catalogs mailed every year
Another article I came across states that over 3.8 billion separate credit card offers were mailed out to Americans in 2008.
And who says capitalism isn’t efficient? The problem is that it’s all too efficient — but not at satisfying human needs.
The only proper way to “Save the world” is to combine like minded people and smash the concept of capital.
Right on! Last spring Bill Clinton said something to the effect of “the only we we can make green policies work is to make them profitable.”
The problem is, they aren’t profitable. It was profitable for the media to blather about Global Warming (one problem among dozens) for a few months last year — until we got tired of hearing about it, but there’s no enterprise that’s going to give up its competitive advantage just to reduce its impact on the environment. Likewise, no nation is going to made better environmental policies because then as a whole their enterprises are at a disadvantage. That said, a few token reforms were possible while the system was running smoothly and accruing “healthy” profits to the capitalists, but in a climate like today’s even those pallid reforms are out of the question. This is why congressional democrats have more or less given up on pushing any kind of “green” agenda, such as it was.