Junk mail.

An interesting statistic emerged this week. One Wollongong resident scrupulously collected all the junk mail that appeared in his letterbox over the preceding year - and weighed it !
The result was 38 kilos of printed matter - which multiplied by the number of letter boxes in Wollongong - amounted to 3,904 tons of what many describe as " rubbish ".
It is true that this amount of paper must result in the death of a huge number of trees and the generation of carbon dioxide during the production and processing of the advertising material, but there is a plus side to junk mail that few consider.
Firstly, there are the people employed in printing the brochures and the even greater number who walk miles each week to put it in your letter box. This is low paid work, but for the chronically unemployed it often is the difference between eating well - or eating poorly.
Not all people deride the daily dose of junk mail. It is a valuable source of information for the housebound and even healthy folk leaf through it and gain information that may otherwise escape them.
Then there is the matter of discount dockets. In particular pizza lovers find junk mail the only source of offers that allow them their regular indulgence at a sharply reduced price.
There have been attempts by governments to reduce the volume of junk mail. In particular, distribution companies are careful to restrict their delivery teams to obey warnings and not stuff letter boxes on multi-story unit blocks because of the resulting litter problems.
It seems that junk mail is now a fact of life and something not destined to disappear in the long term future.
For those into more modern communications it simply morphs into a new form - which we know as " spam " when it appears on our computer screens.
Hence that old saying : " The more things change - the more they stay the same " !