Junk Mail and the Environment: The Numbers

How many trees does junk mail use?

No agency counts trees for advertising mail, so every tree figure is an estimate. Ours, built from current data, is roughly 16 to 49 million trees a year, and it is a ceiling, not a count. Here is the math:

Sources: USPS Revenue, Pieces and Weight report, FY2025; Conservatree, “Trees Into Paper.” The multiplication is ours.

The top of that range assumes every pound of advertising mail is paper made entirely from freshly cut trees about 40 feet tall, the size behind Conservatree's per-ton figures. Real mail falls short of that: not all of its weight is paper, some paper contains recycled fiber, and, as Conservatree points out, “many of the ‘trees’ used to make paper are just chips and sawdust.”

The figure you have probably heard, 100 million trees a year, was estimated in 2007, when advertising mail volume was nearly twice today's. Where that number comes from.

How much junk mail ends up in landfills?

No one has measured that recently. The EPA's latest product-level data counts 3.67 million tons of advertising mail entering the municipal waste stream in 2018, about 1.3% of all the municipal solid waste generated that year. But for every year after 2005, the EPA's tables stop splitting that tonnage into recycled, burned for energy and landfilled.

In 2005, the last year with a split, 35.8% of advertising mail was recycled and 3.06 million tons went to landfills. The EPA's series also shows the category shrinking, from 5.83 million tons in 2005 to 3.67 million in 2018.

The EPA figure and the USPS weight at the top of this page don't match, and shouldn't be expected to: they describe different years (2018 and fiscal 2025), and the agencies measure in different ways.

Is recycling junk mail enough?

It is better than the trash, but it comes late in line. The EPA calls source reduction, not creating the waste at all, “the most environmentally preferred strategy,” ranked ahead of recycling. A recycled flyer has still been made, printed, trucked and delivered.

For advertising mail, source reduction means not sending pieces to people who don't want them. For addressed mail, the free opt-outs in our guide to stopping junk mail do exactly that. For EDDM there is no household opt-out, only a request you can make to each advertiser, one at a time.

How much junk mail goes unread?

39% is thrown away without being read, according to the Postal Service's own Household Mail Survey for fiscal 2025. Households read 51% of their advertising mail and set aside the other 10%.

The average household received 393 pieces of advertising mail that year, down from 659 in 2015. Households headed by someone 65 or older got the most: 529. Ads from businesses a household had no relationship with were read only 36% of the time. Every unread piece was still made, printed and delivered.

Where do the famous junk mail numbers come from?

Search for junk mail statistics and the same handful appear everywhere: 100 million trees, 51.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gases, 28 billion gallons of water, 44% thrown away unopened. Most trace back to two documents: a San Francisco Department of the Environment press release from January 2007, and “Climate Change Enclosed,” an August 2008 report by the advocacy group ForestEthics (now Stand.earth).

Both were written when U.S. advertising mail ran about 100 billion pieces a year, nearly double the 56.8 billion of fiscal 2025. As the numbers were copied from site to site, several also picked up credits to organizations that didn't produce them. This page did that too, until this update.

None of this makes junk mail harmless. The current numbers are smaller, and they still make the case: tens of billions of pieces, millions of tons, and more than a third of it thrown away unread.

Correction, October 2026: earlier versions of this page used all of the figures in this table, plus landfill, transport and savings estimates we could not source, and credited several of them to organizations that did not produce them, including the EPA and the VoLo Foundation. They have been replaced with the sourced figures on this page.

Would an EDDM opt-out help the environment?

Yes, in proportion to how many households use it. An opt-out would not stop anyone getting mail they want; it would stop flyers being printed, trucked and delivered to homes that throw them straight out.

Where cities have gone further and made flyers opt-in, the paper fell fast. Montreal has required a household's consent for flyer delivery since May 2023, and by the city's count the weight of flyers distributed on the island fell from 20,800 tonnes in 2019 to 3,328 tonnes in 2024, a drop of 84%.

Opt-in is a stronger rule than the opt-out the petition asks for, so a U.S. opt-out would cut less. Nor is opt-in an easy sell: France tested it in 14 areas from 2022 to 2025 and chose not to extend it nationwide. But any French household can still refuse flyers with a “Stop Pub” sticker, and Canada Post stops unaddressed advertising for households that ask. The United States has no equivalent. How other countries handle unaddressed advertising.