A Bundle of Hope, A Bundle of Dejection
By Peter Douglas
Staff Writer

Every day at noon the mail rush begins. Students on their way to lunch from their last morning class congregate in one small corner of the Smith Campus Center, eager to see if they were accepted to their prestigious summer internship, or if their mom sent them cookies for Valentine's Day. Within a few minutes the tiny mailroom is so packed that you can barely move, and still more people continue to stream in. The jostling bodies, all driven towards their individual boxes by the burning desire for mail, form a surging mass of college student energy. And then, five minutes later, the mailroom is silent and empty, and all that's left of this daily ritual is an enormous mass of colored paper lying in the recycling bin.

That mass of colored paper is the saddest part of the whole event. By far the majority of the mail received by most students is superfluous junk mail, most of it originating on campus, which students glance at for less than two seconds before pitching it in recycling and forgetting whatever it was the mail was advertising. The whole process seems even more pathetic when you consider that the mail room staff spends hours placing this junk mail in individual boxes, while students take less than a minute to put it in the recycling bin, and Smith Campus Center maintenance staff take a few more minutes taking the recycling bin out and disposing of the contents-a complete cycle of absurdity. Of course, junk mail is a problem everywhere there is mail, and probably will be until the end of time. But it is alarming that so much of this junk mail comes from Pomona and the other colleges. One would think that in this supposedly enlightened environment of higher learning we would find a more efficient way to send messages of general interest and avoid this prodigious amount of daily waste. But that does not seem to be the case.

The major problem with this vast amount of junk mail is obvious: it wastes a vast quantity of paper. The recycling bin that is filled with paper daily is about the size of the trunk of a large tree. When you consider this and the fact that the volume of wood pulp used to make paper is much larger than the volume of paper produced, it becomes evident that the paper wasted in the mailroom equals at least one tree, if not several, a week. That's a lot of trees a year for mail nobody reads. Then there is the extensive dyeing process that turns all the paper neon pink and green so it will catch our attention, which also creates lots of nasty toxins that are sometimes released into streams and rivers. The same is true of the ink that prints the messages. It is wonderful that all this paper is recycled instead of being dumped in a landfill, but that recycling uses a lot of energy, which in Southern California means burning coal or natural gas and adding to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That use of energy wouldn't be necessary if the waste hadn't been produced in the first place. Some of the junk mail, hopefully, is printed on recycled paper, but that paper and the energy used to produce it could have found a better use than being automatically thrown away to be recycled again. The use and recycling of any paper encourages logging, produces toxins, and uses energy, but this resource use is especially problematic when it goes to produce junk mail that is almost always ignored and basically serves no purpose.

Another problem with junk mail is that it creates false mail expectations. It can be quite depressing to look in your mailbox and see a fat, juicy pile of mail, only to realize it's full of fliers telling you about Harwood Halloween, Career Week, or a self-defense workshop, events you either already knew about or don't really care to know about. As Sinéad Hunt '05 put it, "Finding this crap mail in your mail box is like waking up excited on Christmas morning and then having your parents tell you that Santa didn't come this year." As it happens on a daily basis throughout the year, this mailroom disappointment can build up and add on to the already severe stress faced by many college students. Although no studies have been done on this subject, it is quite possible that in addition to its environmental cost, junk mail is having a significant detrimental effect on the college experience.

The main reason that the vast amount of junk mail is so absurd is that there are so many viable and less wasteful alternatives to it. The Pomona Digester is a wonderful innovation that allows any number of messages to reach every student without using any paper at all. While almost no one reads every Digester message, it is very easy to make sure your message will be well read by including a reference to sex, beer, or free food in the title. Strategically placed signs, while they do use paper, are much more efficient than mail, since many students can read the same sign. Signs in bathroom stalls and table tents are especially effective because students are sitting down and can actually take the time to read them. Other, less used methods of communication that are more efficient than junk mail include writing with chalk on sidewalks, performing at the dining halls, and, for the really creative, shaving your message into willing volunteer's hair (ask my suitemate Adam). Chances are, if you put up signs and send e-mails, students who either ignored or missed those messages aren't going to have a sudden revelation that they want to attend your event when they get a flier in their mailbox. Most organizations on campus have realized this and have focused their efforts on e-mails and signs, but a few, namely CCLA, the Career Development Office, and the McAlister Center, continue to send out fliers to mailboxes regularly. These are all wonderful organizations, but they would be serving the Pomona community and global environment at large much more effectively if they sent less unsolicited mail.

Mail is a lovely, splendid thing, but only if it's mail that you want. The large amount of Pomona College junk mail is generally unwanted mail, mail that makes its way from the mailbox to the recycling bin much quicker than it took to produce. There are many ways that Pomona could reduce the amount of waste it produces and the environmental cost of its activities, but one of the simplest and easiest to achieve would be to decrease significantly the amount of junk mail that is circulated within the college. It would make this student a lot happier, too.