Who here doesn’t spam? No, not the damn meat, I’m talking about spam mail. Yup, there you go.

You go to your inbox every morning to check your mail, hoping to find that letter from your ant in Brussels, but instead you get flood with loads of trash mail. Well, besides the fact that junk mail agravates the hell out of most people, and has, more or less, absolutely no purpose, it seems it’s also very harmful for the environment.

How so? A report by the group ForestEthics estimates that destroying forests to make paper for junk mail releases as much greenhouse gas pollution as 9 million cars or seven U.S. states combined, or as much as heating 13 million homes each winter. Here’s what NASA climate scientist James Hansen, a leading voice in the global warming crisis, had to say about the report:

“20 years after I first testified before Congress on the threats posed by climate change, we have reached a point at which we must remove unnecessary carbon emissions from our lives, or face catastrophic consequences. It is hard to imagine waste more unnecessary than the 100 billion pieces of junk mail Americans receive each year, and these new findings, revealing that the emissions of junk mail are equal to those of over nine million cars, underscore the prudent necessity of a Do Not Mail Registry.”

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