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It is estimated that a total of 17.5 billion pieces of junk mail are produced every year. This figure includes both addressed and unaddressed junk mail.
According to Royal Mail, 4.54 billion pieces of addressed junk mail ('direct mail') were pushed through British letterboxes in 2007.
There are few statistics available about the number of unaddressed items sent out. Postcomm, the independent regulator for the postal market, has estimated that the figure for the financial year 2005/2006 was 13 billion. Their calculation includes advertisements posted by hand as well as inserts in newspapers and magazines.
The amount of addressed junk mail sent to British households reached its peak in 2003, when nearly 5.5 billion addressed advertisements were sent out. Volumes have gone down since. However, volumes of unaddressed mail are still increasing by one to two per cent per year.
The overall volume of junk mail is in decline. Addressed junk mail is decreasing by about 240 million pieces a year (about 4.3 per cent) while a 1.5 per cent increase in unaddressed mail amounts to 200 million extra pieces of junk mail. A net decrease of 40 million, or 0.2 per cent of the total volume of junk mail.
It is estimated that there are 60,5 million people in Britain. For each person there are 290 pieces of junk mail per year.
There are about 27 million letterboxes in the UK. Therefore 650 pieces of junk mail are pushed through the average British letterbox every year. That's about 1.8 pieces of junk mail per day per letterbox.
Data from the Direct Marketing Information Service shows that of the 5,13 billion pieces of addressed junk mail sent out in 2005, 78 per cent was sent to consumers and 22 per cent to businesses.
On average, 80 pieces of addressed junk mail are sent out to the 583,000 people who die every year in the UK following their death. In total, that are over 46 million pieces of junk mail. This is despite the fact that organisations can obtain an up to date list with the names and addresses of people who have died from the Bereavement Register.
In February 2008, research by the Read Group, the company behind the Bereavement Register, showed that overall use of such suppression files has increased by 42 per cent in 2007. However, in the same year the charity sector saw a decrease in the use of suppression.