Taming the snail mail monster

This is just about one week's junk mail

We've noticed a steady decline in "real" mail and a steep increase in junk mail over the past few years. Our real mail has declined because we do most of our communication online, and our junk increases because our name is being sold to many organizations and businesses.

I had already put our names on the lists to eliminate catalogs long ago, so we didn't get many of those -- just solicitations or catalogs that don't access that list I guess.

So until this summer, I resigned myself to opening them all to retrieve the fairly large amount of paper that we could use for scrap paper, then putting the rest into the recycling bin. Thank goodness that our county recycles this junk! (Note: I've read on Living Lighter that each year more than 100 million trees are turned into the 5.8 million tons of mail that end up as 450,000 garbage trucks worth of waste!)

Over the past few months, though, I've taken action. This was partly because there was so much in the news about the Post Office's problems and partly because I had become pretty resentful of the time it takes to deal with this junk. Even if I didn't feel compelled to rescue what paper I could out of all of that mess, it takes time to sort out the real mail from the junk.

I've collected all the junk mail we get, then once or twice a week I've been either emailing or making phone calls asking to be taken off the lists. Initially I had thought that email would be easier, but in some cases, it was just too hard to find the appropriate email on the website.

I've kept a list of dates I contacted each organization

I keep a little notebook listing the organizations I've contacted and the date I contacted them. Since some organizations contact me frequently, and since it takes a few months for the mailings to stop,  it was hard to remember if I had already contacted them--hence the list. Each line in the list (in the photo) is one organization, and I have six pages so far! And each day I still get new junk...
 
It was interesting to find that some of these organizations have being taken off their list as a separate item on their phone tree! I guess I'm not the only one doing this.

I should note that there were organizations that I think may be charities that are excuses for a big CEO salary, but there were some organizations I respect and will continue my membership in. For these, it's all the more reason I don't want them to waste money sending stuff I have never responded to.

Another thing we did was to discontinue magazines that come with membership. For example, even though Audubon magazine is beautiful, I just don't have time to read it and I'd rather have them spend their money on bird conservation, not sending me a magazine that will just get recycled.

All in all, it's been somewhat time-consuming, but I'm really looking forward to the time in a few months (it takes a few months for the mailings to cease they tell me) when we'll just have mostly real mail in our mailbox--and for the amount of real mail we receive, once a week delivery would probably be adequate...

Rescuing stones

We get our groceries by backpack (except for extremely bulky or heavy items that warrant an occasional car trip), and today on our way back we happened upon these stones put out to the curb.

They were evidently part of some craft project since some had been painted, but they were nice flat stones, perfect for stepping stones (and they were painted on only one side).

The bigger issue, though, is that these were items that could be reused--one often-ignored part of the 3Rs (reduce, reuse, and recycle). Onondaga County fortunately has one of the country's best recycling program, but do we adequately reduce or reuse? Recycling requires community effort and investment in recycling facilities, which Onondaga County has done. Reducing and reusing is more of an individual commitment.

Stones are not truly a renewable resource in human time scale--they're "mined" from somewhere after all--so we're glad to have rescued these stones for reuse. You can never have too many stepping stones in the garden beds!

And besides, carting this little pile home in my arms provided an extra amount of "free exercise" that we're always looking for. We consider things such as parking far from our destination, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, walking to Wegmans as the kinds of activities we build into our daily lives that take minimal time but cumulatively contribute to good health. This unexpected opportunity built some arm muscles and burned some calories!

No more peanut butter jars

After saving our peanut butter jars for a few years, we've finally reached the point where we have to stop. We have a few hundred--more than enough to store our dried fruit for the fall harvest season. (We LOVE peanut butter. It's one of our favorite foods.)

I know we have enough jars--especially since we're nearing the end of the dried fruit we were storing in them, but it's hard to stop.

Sure, we can recycle them (and our county has one of the best recycling operations in the country), but recycling still involves the cost of carting the materials to the facility and the costs of reconstituting the material into new glass. (Of course, the costs are not ours, but for society.) And I doubt that this material can be infinitely recycled. Certainly many things are actually downcycled, not recycled.

These peanut butter jars have worked so well. They're of uniform size and store just the right amount of dried fruit. Each one would last for years, as has the quart-size jar that was sold for lemon juice a few decades ago. We're still using it today as a handy way to refill our water jug.

Why do we build in so much waste into our daily lives? It's clear there's a limit to the amount one person can do in this situation. I guess we could find a place that sells peanut butter in bulk so we wouldn't accumulate any more jars and we'd be able to use the ones we had, but that would entail a car trip basically just for this thing. And I have to admit that the Wegmans organic peanut butter is our absolute favorite peanut butter.  It's just organic peanuts and salt. (The late William F. Buckley was famous for his preference for Wegmans peanut butter.)  I'd hate to have to switch brands, and I don't think we can get this peanut butter in bulk.

I think the issue is bigger than just our peanut butter. Our modern society has come to think it's reasonable to have single-use containers for everything. It's convenient, but at what a cost.

Hanging out time arrives!

This is the first day I've been able to hang out our laundry. I've been looking forward to this for weeks, both because it's a little easier to hang them on the line than indoors (though our indoor drying racks are pretty easy), but especially because I miss the sunny, fresh air fragrance we enjoy so much.

Now that we've started for the season, I know we'll be able to hang our clothes out until probably November. There have been very few weeks over the past ten years or so when there hasn't been at least one day when it's been good enough weather to dry our laundry outside.

Just hanging out

I haven't minded hanging my laundry inside all winter. In fact, it added much-needed moisture to the dry indoor air. But I was still happy to start hanging my laundry outside again yesterday. It's so nice to be outside, and our laundry again has that sunny fragrance no fabric softener can duplicate.

I expect I won't be drying clothes inside again until October now. Not every day will be nice enough (since we've had snow even in May!) but generally I can wait a few days before we get desperate.

25 Ways to Green the World #10-11

#10: Stop Dirty Energy

Besides signing online petitions, calling Congress etc. about coal, we haven't yet done very much. One idea in the Green American "25 Ways" article I'm using for this list is to shift our energy use to the evening hours to reduce peak demand. From now on, we'll do our laundry and run the dishwasher in the evening or early in the morning. (In the summer, I have to do the laundry in the morning in order to hang the clothes outdoors.)

#11: Rethink Your Transportation

We've always used our cars less than average since we're basically home bodies. We've always grouped errands, since it saves times as well as gas. Beyond that, though, we've made a conscious effort to reduce our car use. For the last few years before retirement, John bicycled to work even in the winter unless it was below 25 degrees or actively snowing; in those cases, he took the bus. In the winter, when it was too dark to ride a bike home, he used the handy bike carrier on the front of the bus.

Lately, instead of doing our exercise walking around the neighborhood, we've discovered we can walk to Wegmans, each with a backpack, in the same amount of time. So instead of frequent trips in a car (since the grocery store was one trip I never could seem to cut back on) we get small amounts of groceries about 4-5 times a week. We've done the same with the library in the other direction (complete with some challenging hills to climb).

And when we do drive, we use our Prius.

25 Ways to Green the World #8-9

#8: Put Efficiency First

We're doing pretty well with this one. Except for a few mistakes, we've chosen energy-efficient appliances (refrigerator, front-loading washer, CFLs, etc.), and when we have a choice, we use them as little as possible. For example, we're pretty good at turning off lights when we're not in the room. One mistake is that we chose a small (5 cu. ft.) freezer that wasn't Energy Star-qualified. Since the store where we bought it had no small Energy Star freezers, we thought that perhaps there weren't any in this size category.

We've also tested our appliances with the Kill-A-Watt meter to see how much energy they use.

One of the most important ways we've saved energy is by not using our electric clothes dryer. We hang clothes up outdoors in the summer, and indoors in the winter. This has the bonus of humidifying our chronically dry air in the winter. We're lucky to have found a very convenient clothes rack that folds up easily, then expands to hold a whole load of laundry. It has metal rods, so I can use my regular clothes pins. Once you get used to it, hanging laundry really doesn't take much longer to do since you're essentially straightening out the clothes when you're hanging them up as opposed to straightening them out when you take them out of the dryer.

An interesting website: Project Laundry List.

#9: Advance Green Energy

We've purchased 100% wind energy for almost seven years now. We were one of the first customers when this option became available.

We looked into solar panels - and even paid for the $300 evaluation for its suitability - but it just doesn't work for our location. Partly, it's a problem with the orientation of the roof, though that's not insurmountable. The main issue is trees. We would have had to cut down the tree on the south side of the house that shades our house in the summer. And even that wasn't insurmountable. I would have done it, though I would have been sad. The real problem is that we would have to ask neighbors never to plant a large tree (which would have made our solar installation worthless). This would be a lot to ask of people, and for that matter, we would have had to ask neighbors to sign a solar easement, adding to the cost and complication of the project. All in all, we decided that there would have to be other ways for us to advance green energy. Maybe some day, there will be improvements in PV panels that would make this feasible.

We also checked out solar hot water heating, but given the pipes in our house this would have been prohibitively expensive.