Saturday, February 03, 2007

Waste

I've come to see my daily trip to the mailbox as the garbage run.

I go to the box, come inside, sort through that which should be shredded and that which should go straight to the recycling bin. When life is overly busy, this can pile up for a few weeks. This week I took note of how much actual necessary mail I received. It came to exactly two items: a bill (which can't be received online) and my W-2 (which actually can).

So --
we're cutting down trees
burning fuel to manufacture all this junk
burning fuel to deliver all this junk
burning a tiny bit of electricity each time I run the shredder
burning fuel to take the stuff to the landfill (where the recycling center is).

No wonder our environment is hurting.

People hate spam, but I don't. I use a Hotmail address for all my business transactions, and my spam accumulates there, where I deal with it at my leisure. I'll take spam over stuff that exists just for the purpose of going to the landfill.

What a waste.

1 comment:

tongfengdemao said...

I'm with you on this. Well, mostly. I do hate spam, too. If you're willing to separate the plastic and color from the rest of the paper, you can compost shredded paper. That's what I'm doing with it.