October 11, 2007
Personal experience, local law enforcement agencies and media warnings about identity theft convinced me that I could no longer just toss junk mail in the trash. I needed instead to carry these daily piles of unsolicited materials into my home, sort through them for any mail of actual value, then shred the rest before taking it back to the curbside trash. In my Glendale, California home that meant carrying all things unwanted up five flights of stairs, six days a week, sorting, shredding and then hauling this trash back to the street.
When I shredded this mail myself, an effort that was noisy, time consuming and tedious, I managed to burn out two shredders before I decided to save the mail and let a commercial outfit do the shredding. This seemed like a lot of work for something I didn’t want in the first place.
I realized that each little pile was its own problem to deal with, but what did a year’s worth of this rubbish amount to? I decided the only way to find out was to save a year’s worth of junk mail. Perhaps then I could get a physical sense of our household’s annual share of direct mail deliveries. I began gathering January 1, 2006 and stopped December 31, 2006. It was a year that included moving to a new home in a more affluent zip code that came with an intriguing upgrade in the quality of what was being advertised. Instead of constant solicitations for remodeling, refinancing or credit cards, we were being offered opportunities for luxury cruises, fractional jet ownership and airport limo services.
During the course of that year and in the spare time I had since I stopped shredding the mail, I did some junk mail research. I discovered:
- Americans received 28 billion pieces of junk mail in 1979, and now annually receive, depending on which website you check, anything between 42 billion, 77 billion and 100 billion pieces of junk mail.
- The average American will spend 8 months of their life handling junk mail.
- Junk mail uses more landfill space than disposable diapers and polystyrene foam products combined.
- Forty-four percent of all junk mail goes unopened into the landfill.
- If it’s true, as one source claims, that 100 million trees are cut down to produce junk mail annually, then 44 million trees die annually to make all the junk mail that comes into our homes only long enough to pass through our hands before going directly into the trash.
- In a typical year 1.8 billion pounds of junk mail are undeliverable. Fifteen million trees die to produce this undeliverable pile of unsolicited advertising.
- Fifty-nine catalogs are sent annually to each man, woman, and child. Victoria’s Secret alone sends 395 million catalogs a year.
- Each postal carrier annually carries 18 tons of junk mail. The post office is the biggest employer in the country next to Wal Mart, with more than 200 thousand mail carriers.
- Mail carriers suffer injuries that can lead to permanent disabilities from the weight of this junk mail. Still, the mail carriers union has lobbied against legislation to prevent or slow the junk mail stream. The post office’s preferred term for junk mail is “bulk mail.”
After learning all this, I felt that even if someone wanted to translate these statistics into numbers of football fields and Empire State Buildings, I couldn’t begin to imagine the physical reality of the American junk mail phenomenon.
While I was collecting the junk mail and its related statistics, I couldn’t help but notice my local mail carrier was wearing a major wrist brace while driving her delivery truck. She had carpal tunnel syndrome, the reason I hadn’t seen her on the job for a long spell. She said it was because of the weight of her daily junk mail deliveries. The holiday catalog season, she said, was “the worst.”
When I asked a post office supervisor if I could stop mail delivery to another address where I do not receive solicited mail, i.e. bills, letters, and magazines I’ve personally subscribed to, I was told that was not an option. If I had a mailbox, they were required to deliver unsolicited junk mail to it. I was required to periodically remove it to enable the delivery of more unsolicited mail. This supervisor explained that direct mail businesses were “our customers” because they paid the postal service to deliver their advertisements to our mailboxes.
Until then I had believed that the American public was the customer of the U.S. Postal Service, a “statutory monopoly” created by Congress and, since 1971, operated as an independent agency of the federal government. To the extent our tax dollars support and sustain this protected federal agency, I believe U.S. citizens are not only forced to pay for this daily trash delivery, but are also being required to volunteer their time to process it. I can’t help but wonder how the eight months of each of our lives might be better spent than sifting through this government authorized trash. Maybe we should count our blessings, as we sort through our unwanted paper piles, that no other entity besides the U.S. Postal Service is legally allowed to make deposits in our mailboxes.
Early in 2007, I drove the results of my collecting efforts to a commercial shredding facility in Sun Valley, California, where I was able to shred and retain the entire mass. I drove home with seven 45-gallon plastic trash bags weighing a total of 157 pounds. I began to see this accumulation as a rising tide of unwanted mail threatening to drown our cities and suburbs in what I consider a reverse trash stream that steals our time while it pollutes our personal environments.
When I told my artist friend and occasional collaborator Barbara Hashimoto of my efforts, she suggested turning the Junk Mail Project into a dual city effort. In June, she began collecting and shredding the office junk mail of the BauerLatoza Studio, an architectural firm where she is artist in residence, and producing audio and video recordings of this process. The Chicago presentation of the Junk Mail Project’s first phase will be displayed this October 20-21 and 27-28 as part of Chicago Artists’ Month festivities in Hashimoto’s studio in the Randolph Motor Building, a 100-year old former car showroom in Chicago’s historic Motor Row District.
The Los Angeles presentation of the Junk Mail project will be November 9, 2007 through November 24, 2007 at L.A. Contemporary Gallery, 2634 South La Cienega Blvd., Culver City. An opening reception will be held November 9, from 6-9 p.m.
Meanwhile, as my household’s share of annual unwanted correspondence erupts from a row of garbage cans in anticipation of the shredding truck’s annual call, I look forward to blogging further on the issues junk mail raises in our contemporary world. Like how much does each citizen pay for the privilege of receiving this modern sludge and what, financially, emotionally and physically is eight months of our lives worth, is the rise of junk mail contributing to the death of newspapers, do crack addicts really have all the time in the world to piece together my personal information from said shreds and wherein lies the art and poetry in a stack of this stuff? Stay tuned…
