The cost of advertising

Have you ever thought about how much it costs it costs to advertise to you? Not the cost to the advertiser, but the cost to you?

Every weekend a bunch of flyers gets pushed into my mail box. They end up in a blue bag and get hauled off to the dump where I think they get sent on to a 'balefill' facility in another county. I don't know if or when they actually get recycled.

This morning the flyer collection weighed 200grams. This was actually a light load, am I am sure that at other seasons we regularly get twice that amount or more. But lets stick at 200g. Over the course of a year that is 20kg. There are 18,000 households in Pictou County, so that comes to an annual total weight of 360 tonnes.

Don't forget that is just one county. How much would this be for the whole of Nova Scotia, or Canada. Bear in mind too that most of this advertising trash comes from large corporations, not small local retailers, so much of the economic advantages of flyer advertising flows out of the local community.

Who pays for collecting and processing all this? I bet it's not the advertisers or the printers. It's you and me through our municipal taxes. And of course the cost of your blue bags.