Revenge of the Recyclers! Call to Action!!!

This blog entry has nothing to do with energy, unless you are willing to make some logical leaps and count how much energy it takes to produce junk mail.

Some of you might start to wonder why trivial matters like this can set me off, but here is the story of how a bank got on the nerves of a fervent advocate of recycling:

If any of you recycle paper, you might notice that the lion's share of your paper recycling bin is filled with those free newspapers that litter your driveway every morning, and junk mail offers you receive, especially credit card companies and banks which print some nonsense on the envelope like "About your account," or "Pay to the Order of" in order to get you to open it, only to realize that you have been duped into reading their canned advertisement.

Whenever possible, I try not to let them get their money's worth of advertising from me, and hurl the unopened envelope into the recycling bin. The tree was already wasted, but at least the paper can be reused for something else, but hopefully not for another advertisement or piece of junk mail.

Lately, one bank, and I hope this does not become a trend in advertising, has devised a way of preventing the automatic flick-to-the-recycle-bin reflex, forcing me to open their envelope. Yes, if there are advertising executives reading this post, this will only confirm to them that their devious technique is working.

Their secret? Capital One Small Business has inserted a piece of plastic bubble wrap into their envelope to protect their very delicate paper advertisements from damage. The plastic in entirely unnecessary and is an additional waste of resources. Plus, it prevents easy recycling of their materials.

Therefore, I have decided that Capital One Small Business is better prepared to deal with their own materials than I am, and am leaving it up to them to recycle this material. Every time Capital One sends an advertisement with the plastic, I stuff it back into their postage-paid-by-addressee envelope so that their processors can handle it. This lets them pay twice for their wasteful advertising, and will give their processors some busy work.

If enough people do this, maybe Capital One will stop marketing this way, and other banks will not follow their example? Writing to them did not work, so maybe this will get their attention?

This would be especially effective if others repeated it. Stuff those advertisements back into their postage-paid return envelopes and send them back to the advertisers!

I wonder how many trees it would save if that stopped the wasteful mailings?

I wonder how we can get AOL, Intuit, and other software retailers to stop sending those Compact Disks through the mail? I understand that CD's are not recyclable. Is that true?

It would be great to get some comments with other ideas for "sticking it to the [advertising] man!"

Yours Truly,

Dennis Meizys

PS - This weblog was intentionally posted without advertising links just to stay in the spirit of anti-advertising! I hope you appreciated that! If you missed the ads, scroll down to past issues where you can find plenty of them.