Save Your Time, Your Money, and the Planet

Each Year, America Dumps Into Landfills 2 Billion Tons . . . of Mail

We can do better. And with Earth Class Mail online postal mail, we can help you do better too.

Of all the materials we recycle in America, mail is the least recovered of all. While 50% of all paper is recycled, only 22% of mail is reused to benefit our environment.

  • In the U.S., over 200 billion pieces of mail are sent each year. With only 22% being recycled, 156 billion pieces are filling up landfills. That's one million tons. That's 2 billion pounds of paper!
  • That means that each year, we have to cut down enough trees to make another 156 billion pieces of mail, wasting well over 2 billion pounds of trees.
  • The U.S. throws away 1 billion trees' worth of paper every year.

But there's no reason mail can't be a friend to the environment.

  • For every ton of paper we recycle, we reduce the air pollution produced by new paper production by 74%, and water pollution by 35%. We also keep more toxic ink, formaldehyde and other chemicals out of the landfills.

  • For every ton of paper we recycle, we save 204 trees and consume 8,190 fewer gallons of petroleum.

Saving Trees, One Letter at a Time

If we were to recycle 100% of our mail, we'd save hundreds of millions of trees and 8.2 billion gallons of oil per year. We'd reduce our landfill consumption rate by 5%. Today, you recycle perhaps 16% of your mail. Our customers recycle over 60% of their mail.

Like gasoline and other consumables, Americans receive many times more mail per year than other developed countries. If you care about the mileage you get out of your car, you may want to be aware of how much of your mail winds up in landfills. In fact, for each person like you, reading this page, the amount of mail that winds up in landfills each year amounts to between 100 and 200 pounds per person. You throw away enough mail that, compressed, it would be the size of a mattress.

If you use the Earth Class Mail service, we encourage you to recycle 100% of the mail that you do not have forwarded to you. For added security, we truck secured containers of refuse mail directly to recycling facilities to be immediately disintegrated and made into new paper. That means recycling is as secure as shredding, and much more environmentally friendly. Did you know that once paper is shredded, the paper fiber is destroyed and it cannot be reused as paper?

We also reduce the environmental toll by reducing the 6 billion pieces of lost mail that the USPS has to return to sender or send to the landfills each year. Because our users won't be changing their mailing address every five years like the average American, they are far less likely to lose any of their mail. How much mail is that going to keep out of the waste stream? According to USPS statistics, about 50 pieces of mail per year per household and far more for businesses.

It all adds up. And that's just the paper!

Cutting Down on Oil Dependency and Emissions that Cause Global Warming

Every piece of mail delivered to commercial mail receiving agency like Earth Class Mail Corp. is a piece of mail the Postal Service doesn’t have to deliver all the way to your home or office. Just as recycling saves oil, fewer deliveries mean lower fuel usage and emissions, too. Even the Postal Service is happy, reducing labor costs and wear and tear on vehicles and improving their on-time delivery performance.