Yellow Pages or Junk

Raise your hand if you have a Yellow Pages book in your home, okay, almost all of you. Now raise your hand if you receive "junk mail", yeah, thought so.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you kept all that junk mail (a.k.a. Direct Mail), you received for a year?

I was at a Yellow Pages conference towards the end of last year & that exact thought flashed across my mind. What I was interested in finding out was what would weigh more, the four Yellow Pages Directories I've got in my home, or all the junkmail I collect over the period of 12 months?

I didn't have to wait very long to find out. Just four months after I'd started with my little experiment, I've got some interesting numbers for you. Now of course these may not be valid for everyone, but I couldn't find anyone else that was crazy enough to have kept their junk mail for four months, which already tells you something...

So, here are the numbers. The junk mail weighed in at 12 pounds & all four of my Yellow Pages Directories together amounted to 9.4 pounds!

It means I collected 3 pounds of junk mail per month. If you do the math & extrapolate, that amounts to 36 pounds of junk mail per year! I'm pretty confident that after a year, those Yellow Pages Directories would still be 9.4 pounds & unlike the junk mail, each of those Yellow Pages are still useful.

I'd really like to continue my experiment to collect a full 12 months worth of junk mail, but what I've got already looks like a pile of trash. At first I tried organizing or at least stacking them, but it just didn't work, you can't keep that in your house (I eventually had to keep it in a corner of my garage).

Where's my Yellow Pages? Next to my phone :-)