[LINK] Greenhouse contribution of letters

[Scott Howard]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 2:52 PM, Tom Worthington <Tom.Worthington at tomw.net.au>
wrote:

> The US Postal Service is studying the contribution of letters to CO2
> emissions <http://www.usps.com/environment/greenhousegas.htm#H5>. But then
> they claim that advertising mail reduces harmful emissions, by informing
> consumers and so reducing shopping trips. So I am not sure how credible the
> research they fund is.


Based on the volume of junk mail I get delivered by USPS every day of the
week I find this difficult to believe (My mailbox is only accessible by
USPS, and not by random people delivering junk mail).

The vast majority of this junk mail is not of the form that "informs" -
unless you consider a coupon to save 10 cents on a packet of biscuits
"informing"...


So that works out to about 1.64 g of CO2 per km per kg of cargo, or 0.14 g
> per letter per km.


That doesn't look right...  Your letter is 12g or 0.012kg, so the correct
amount is 1.64*0.012 = 0.02 g of CO2 per letter per km. or 20g for the
1000km flight below.

A letter which went 1,000 km (about the distance from Canberra to Brisbane)
> would produce about 136 g of CO2 equivalent.
>

Very little standard mail in Australia is transported by air.  With a few
exceptions (eg, some ExpressPost and some remote destinations) all mail is
transported by either road or rail.  The Australia Post website gives an
estimated time of 3 days for a letter from Canberra to Brisbane, which is
clearly a road/rail time rather than air.

  Scott.