junk

So, amongst the scrap papers on my desk is the one that says "tags" "ties" and "flyers"

It's a good thing I am an expert in cryptic, because I am the only one that would understand that note.

It means: last year (2007) I saved every twist tie and plastic bag tag that came into the house. This was something very do-able - a small bowl on the counter - and on January 1, 2008 I tallied it up. The number was quite high - 71 bread type tags (the plastic flat ones) and 69 twist ties. That is 140 tags and ties that came here and eventually would have gone to the landfill, had I not put them in a ziploc bag in my pantry. It doesn't sound like that much, and it definitely doesn't look like that much, but if we are an average household, imagine that number multiplied across my street, my county, my state, and then the entire United States. Holy crap that's a lot of plastic. I have no ideas or solutions to offer - it was just something I did for a year, and am doing it again this year. The kicker is that I even reuse these things - if I open a bag of frozen peas, I grab a twistie and put it on there. There were weeks when I even made our own bread, so I'm sure our number could have been a bit higher. Interesting.

Another interesting number I came up with, and this is slightly more annoying, is the number of flyers for political candidates we received in the weeks and months leading up to the election on February 5th. I ended up with 54 flyers, a stack that was over an inch high. This is crazy. And, we're not done yet because I have started another stack of flyers that we are getting on an almost daily basis for the special election which is next Saturday, March 8th. The stack won't be as impressive this time, seeing as there are only two candidates running, but since there are two registered voters here, we get two of everything, from each candidate. You would think that they would have a mailing program that would let you do a query and eliminate duplicate addresses, or something like that.

So that's my rant about junk. It's just something to think about, or at least it's something I think about.