The Doormat Tally: Three Weeks of Junk Mail on the Kitchen Scales

For three weeks in October, every piece of unsolicited post that came through our letterbox went into a shoebox instead of the recycling. At the end of it, we tipped the lot onto the kitchen scales. The result was 1.62kg, thirty-five items, and a fairly clear picture of where it all comes from.

The weigh-in: 1.62kg in 21 days

Sorted by type, the haul broke down like this:

• 13 takeaway menus and local flyers — 210g
• 6 charity collection bags — 330g
• 5 credit-card and loan offers in windowed envelopes — 180g
• 4 estate agent cards — 90g
• 3 supermarket leaflets — 120g
• 2 local magazines — 460g
• 2 catalogues — 230g

That's about 77g a day, or roughly 28kg a year if nothing changes. Call it the weight of a small suitcase, or four reams of A4. Not a catastrophe on its own — but it's the corner of household waste you have the most direct control over, which makes it worth a proper look.

Addressed and unaddressed are two different problems

Addressed mail has your name or your address on it: the loan offer, the 'Dear Occupier' letter, the insurance renewal you didn't ask for. It's covered by the industry's own preference scheme, which is why the first thing to try is registering to have your details taken off direct-mail lists.

Unaddressed mail is the rest — menus, charity bags, 'we've just sold on your street' cards. It arrives by two separate routes: Royal Mail's Door to Door service, which is paid to deliver it, and independent distributors who are paid per leaflet. Neither route has any interest in your recycling bin, and the opt-outs are different for each, which is why one sticker on the door rarely does the whole job.

Why the 'no junk mail' sticker is only half a plan

Stickers work on some hand deliverers and are cheerfully ignored by others. There's no law that makes them binding, and the distributors who push menus through doors at 7pm on a Tuesday are not, on the whole, checking. Still, it's worth doing: put it at eye level, make the wording specific ('no menus, no charity bags, no flyers'), and ask your council's waste team whether they hand them out free. Several do. A sticker is a signal, not a filter — but signals matter.

The opt-outs that are actually worth your time

Royal Mail Door to Door. You can opt out of unaddressed mail delivered by Royal Mail by emailing their door-to-door team with your name and address. It takes a few weeks to kick in and won't touch leaflets delivered by anyone else, but it's free and it works.

The Mailing Preference Service. Run by the DMA, this is the one for addressed mail. Register online, free, and expect up to four months before the reduction is fully felt — companies update their lists on their own schedules. Re-register if you move house.

Your Choice. Also run by the DMA, this one covers unaddressed mail from member companies. It's the closest thing to a single switch for the menu-and-flyer pile, though it only binds the firms that have signed up.

Your council. Local waste teams often keep stickers, and some run no-cold-calling zones or log complaints about repeat flyering. Worth a look at your council's website before you assume there's nothing there.

What still lands, and why

Some of it is genuinely outside the system. Election leaflets are exempt from opt-outs and arrive by volunteer hand — nobody is going to stop those. Menus from your local kebab shop are hand-delivered by the shop itself, so the only lever is a polite word at the counter. Charity bags are the sneakier one: many are commercial collections operating under a charity's name, and the small print is where you find out who's actually collecting. Check the charity number on the bag against the Charity Commission register before you fill it.

And a word on windowed envelopes: most UK councils take them in the kerbside paper recycling, window and all. The plastic film is separated out during pulping. Don't peel it, don't shred it, and definitely don't put it in the compost.

A letterbox plan you'll actually keep

1. Weigh a week's worth first. A baseline makes the rest feel worth doing.
2. Sticker at eye level, specific wording, replaced when it peels.
3. Royal Mail Door to Door opt-out — one email.
4. Register with the Mailing Preference Service and Your Choice in the same ten minutes.
5. Note the date. Opt-outs take weeks; a reminder to check the pile in two months stops you assuming it failed.
6. Keep a small script by the door for hand deliverers: 'Thanks — we're not taking menus, but I'll happily pin one in the window.' It works more often than you'd think.

The honest bit

Recycling a leaflet isn't the same as not receiving it. Paper is one of the easier materials to reprocess, but it still costs energy, water and a collection round to get there — and 28kg a year of anything is worth designing out rather than tidying up. The realistic goal isn't a silent letterbox. It's halving the pile, knowing which bits are genuinely out of your hands, and no longer starting the morning with a small, pointless sigh on the doormat.