Well, Christmas has passed for another year. Has it helped the climate? Well, perhaps it has: in the 8 weeks prior to Christmas we received over 6kg of junk mail. Here is our weekly allotment:
How has this helped the climate? Well, assuming that most of the junk mail is paper, and most of the paper is cellulose (i.e. (C6H10O5)n), then we could suppose that the junk mail is about 40% carbon. So our junk mail before Christmas amounted to about 2.4kg of carbon. Now in Sydney there are over 1.5 million households. Now if each of those averaged the same, that’s 3,600 tonnes of carbon safely stored away in junk mail ;-).
Always picked you as an environmentalist, Martin.