These days, it seems like everybody wants to save/protect the environment. We aren’t allowed to get disposable grocery bags anymore (at least not here), people are driving like passive maniacs in the name of “hypermiling,” buses are over-crowded, and my office has installed composting bins everywhere and switched to Play-Doh silverware. With all of this effort, it seems to me that we all might have missed an easy target to reduce waste. Take a look at what I pulled out of my mailbox today (this was 2 days worth of mail).

Not only would getting rid of junk mail be an excellent way to save paper, it would also require less energy to transport all this crap around from place to place, to recycle it when people throw it away, and to dispose of whatever percentage can’t be (or just isn’t) recycled. Even better, and this is something people don’t place enough weight on, it would be less of a bother for everybody. Getting rid of junk mail is damn near universal in this country. Think of how many people go home every day and have to grab the extra mail from their mailbox, sort through it, and throw away the crap they don’t care about. Put it all together and that’s a lot of cumulatively wasted effort and time. I know there are ways to opt out of it, but that’s the wrong way around. This is just too easy of a target for the people pushing us all to conserve resources; I can’t believe they haven’t gone after it yet.