A grim factoid:

. . . [E]ach year, the Junk Mail Monster destroys about 68 million trees, wastes 28 billion gallons of water, and costs about $450,000,000 of you money to cart its promos, pleas and promises to and from incineratiors, garbage dumps and recycling centers? That equates to about 34 pounds of junk mail for every man, woman and child in the U.S. It's like stuffing a whole tree into our mailboxs each year.

The amount of junk mail sent each year in the USA is striking. Even if you recycle there are still enormous environmental costs in terms of ink, energy to produce deliver and recycle the paper, recycling inefficiencies and loss of viragin forests to create high quality glossy paper much junk mail uses.

A friend recently emailed me to ask whether I knew of any way to stop the junkiest of that junk mail -- the literal trash that fills most of our mailboxes. I'm talking about the sloppy, slidy, pulpy, shopper saver coupon stuffing sh*t. It's nothing but incredibly annoying trash, and you can't just casually toss it into the trash because it has a way of wrapping itself around genuine mail.

Because it is sent to "Occupant" "Resident," or "Postal Customer," it is very difficult to refuse it. And Direct Marketing Associates (a place which has this special web site where consumers can have their names removed) can only remove names. Addresses are off-limits. So are "non-member mailings" -- which the trash often is.

The worst of all is the sloppy bundle of store advertising circulars that don't even have your address! They're just paying the post office to stick the pile in every box. If neither your name nor your address is anywhere on the pile, what's to remove from any list?

This is one of those stubborn problems without an easy solution, and unfortunately, the United States Postal Service is a major part of the problem. Not that your mail carrier wants to throw his back out of kilter carrying around trash he knows you don't want. But even if you ask him to stop delivering it, and he's kind enough to honor your request, he'll be fired:

The seven long-time St. Petersburg mail carriers thought they were doing their customers a favor: Some people along their route had asked they not deliver bulk-mail catalogs and advertising letters.

The U.S. Postal Service fired them, saying bulk mailers paid to have their mail delivered to every address. The postal carriers -- averaging more than 21 years of service among the seven of them -were fired.

"Who is the post office working for -- the customers or the advertising industry?" Ed Vaughan, one of the fired workers, asked St. Petersburg Times reporter Tom Zucco.

That Vaughan -- and six of his colleagues -- are not wearing postal uniforms any more should answer that question. The United States Postal Service receives about a third of its revenues from bulk mailers. Bulk mail also accounts for more than three-quarters of the mail delivered, and can quickly fill mailboxes and engulf first-class mail.

(Emphasis added.)

It's as if the bulk mailers have a right to force your mailman to throw their trash into your mailbox. According to the 9th Circuit, they do! Even prisons can't stop it.

Bulk mailers make sure their items get to everyone imaginable. Early this year, the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a lower-court ruling that overturned a ban on bulk mail to prisoners by Washington state's Department of Corrections.

Prison officials banned junk mail, saying it make the prison easier to run and it reduced the risk of fire. The court ruled the bulk mailers had a First Amendment right.

There are two different companies: ADVO ("Mailbox Values") and Harte Hanks ("Potpourri") that send these out in different areas around the US. The advertising is sent as a "supplement" to an address card which has the postage-paid notice on it.

These bundles are sent to every address in the affected areas, and it takes two separate actions to stop it. First you have to get ADVO or Hart Hanks to stop printing the address card, and only then can you get your mail carrier to stop delivering the advertising.

Both ADVO and Harte Hanks have local offices scattered around the country, and the best way to get off their list is to talk to the local office. The cards usually have the local phone number on them, or at least an address (call directory assistance.) Ask for the circulation department, and call back in a week to check that they really did remove your address. Be prepared to wait 8 weeks for the mail to stop. They'll occasionally "accidentally" send out another card, but it's easier to stop them the second time.

Your postal carrier "knows" that everyone on the route is supposed to get one, so she'll keep delivering them even if it looks like the address card is lost. It's against the law for them to deliver unaddressed mail, so it only takes a phone call to the supervisor at the local post office to convince the carrier to stop. There will occasionally be a mistake after that (when there's a substitute or new carrier) but it doesn't take very many calls to convince the supervisor you really mean it.

First, USPS Form 1500 might get more notice. It was originally put out by the post office to allow residents with children to reject catalogs the addressee found pornographic or offensive.

But in 1970, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected arguments from a mass mailer that the form was unconstitutional. In fact, the court said the bulk material didn't even need to be pornographic to have delivery stopped.

Wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger for the court: "We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even `good' ideas on an unwilling recipient . . . The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain."

I can't believe I have a right to stop unwanted material. Perhaps if neighbors all got together and filled out the forms (litter is a form pornography, and anything can be stopped by Form 500) they could rid their neighborhoods of junk mail along entire carrier routes. This would save work for the local mailman, who'd only have to dump litter on the handful who didn't opt out, and delivering real letters to the majority who did. Who knows? This might even help the mailman's self esteem (who wants to be a paid litterbug anyway?) and thereby lead to a decrease in postal shootings. Plus it would save the trees!

Sigh.

Freedom from legalized littering is probably just utopian thinking.

That's about as much time as I'm willing to devote to this junk.