“Junk” suggests that advertising mail benefits no one, that it is useless and without worth. But the truth is that advertising mail provides important values. It fuels economic growth by generating sales. It provides jobs for people in every state. It’s vital to charitable, educational, consumer, ecological, political and medical causes nationwide. It brings coupons and catalogs to millions of Americans each day, including the elderly, the rural and the disabled.

Advertising mail supports our universal mail delivery system by lowering the cost of postal services. In fact, without advertising mail, the price of a first-class letter would soar.

Why? The Postal Service has fixed costs for people and facilities. Advertising mail represents about half of all mail volume. Take away advertising mail and to keep universal postal deliveries nationwide, six days a week, you still need most of the postal facilities and people now on the payroll. Fewer users sharing largely the same fixed costs means only one thing — vastly higher rates for the postal patrons who remain.

Don’t let anybody fool you. Advertising mail is many things. But it’s not “junk.”

Mail. The Medium that Delivers.

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And yet while the Internet is surely important there’s another story to tell: A traditional paper-based media is now more widely used than a decade ago. That media? The mailstream.

Did you know:

___Nine million jobs inside our borders could not exist without an efficient and effective postal system.

___Between 1996 and 2007, ad mail volume increased from 72 billion pieces a year to 104 billion — a huge gain, especially given the growth of email and online communication in general.

___U.S. advertisers will spend more than $60 billion marketing through the mails in 2008.

___America exports scrap paper worth almost $1.5 billion to China — scrap which includes some of the nearly 40 percent of all advertising mail we recycle each year.

___The mailstream reaches 148 million delivery points.

___Even if we do not build additional landfills, because of new technology America has a growing volume of landfill space.

___We have more forest acreage in the United States today than we had in 1920.

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