Two feet tall, 50 pounds deep: one year's worth of junk mail. Credit: Alan Durning

I just got my new IKEA catalogue! The one I didn’t want or request, the one that was removed from the front porch and directly dumped into the bottom of my recycle bin. It’s annual arrival got me thinking about all the junk mail I receive in a year and I contemplated saving it all in a big pile and weighing it and… oh! Hey! Seattleite Alan Durning over a Sightline just did that!

His <a href="
http://daily.sightline.org/daily_score/archive/2009/07/29/going-postal”>write-up of a year’s worth of junk mail is pretty funny—15 pounds of phone books? 17 credit card offers from United Airlines? Seven pounds of annoying sales pitches from Qwest, Verizon and Comcast? This shit is ridiculous, but Durning includes action ideas after each item to help channel that frustration into activism.

It would be cool to chronicle Portland’s biggest junk mail offenders. I think it must be phone books by far but I can also commiserate with the Comcast deluge.

Two feet tall, 50 pounds deep: one year's worth of junk mail.

  • Alan Durning
  • Two feet tall, 50 pounds deep: one year’s worth of junk mail.

Sarah Shay Mirk reported on transportation, sex and gender issues, and politics at the Mercury from 2008-2013. They have gone on to make many things, including countless comics and several books.

4 replies on “50 Pounds of Pure Junk”

  1. without junk mail what would the USPS do all day? deliver netflix, bills and …

    it’s not in their best interests to setup a do not mail list.

  2. Oh, fuck off all you anti-business asswipes. You buy a fucking magazine and ignore almost all the ads in it and for that you pay $4.95 or something. At least “junk mail” you can ignore for free. Get a brain and use it.

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