I expect that most people have found making a charitable donation mostly gets you lots of additional solicitations. Lately, these have been getting fatter and heavier as well. It’s to the point that they have become wasteful of the soliciting organizations’ funds, and a problem for us to recycle.
The worst of those things are the sheets of stickers and return address labels now showing up in virtually every packet of such materials. We get as many as 100 or so labels on any given day. I do not wish to advertise for all those organizations, and I don’t send that much mail. The question today is what to do with them. The obvious option is to recycle them, but I have concerns about that, so I asked the experts.
It seemed to me that the stickers should just float off when the underlying paper was pulped at the recycling mill, in the same way the window on an envelope is floated off. The residue is then filtered out, and either burned for energy or sent to a landfill, depending on the policies of the mill. One problem is that I am very much into security, and jealous of my personal information. With the recycling route, we don’t know who is going to handle that information, or what they will do with it. For some years now, I have routinely shredded anything with my Personally Identifiable Information (PII) on it, as well as that of anyone else (especially my clients) whose information I no longer needed. In this case, I’m concerned that the glue can gum up my shredder and the shredded mess will no longer compost. If I put the stuff into the trash, it will go, in the relative security of my blue bag, to either Casella’s landfill or ecomaine’s waste-to-energy plant.
The larger issue, the experts tell me, is that the mills that re-pulp the paper find those stickers contain more glue than paper, so the mills really don’t want them. They consider the stickers a contaminant in the bale of paper. Add that to the security concerns (however strongly you might or might not feel about those), and you have a strong case for putting the stickers directly into the trash.
Better, of course, would be to get fewer of the labels in the first place. I’ve mentioned in past columns, a couple of places and organizations that say they can get large groups of others to stop sending the stuff. I have no direct progress to report on that front, even from the ones that charge a fee. What has given me some limited success is writing directly to the organizations.
When I get yet another solicitation from one of these, even ones I’m willing to support once a year, I write my note on the front of the sheet we’re supposed to send back with our money, but do not include a check.
The first note is nice and just says I can only do this once a year, or that I’m giving to local causes these days, so please don’t ask again. If they’re local, I will say you come up in my calendar in [whatever month]. The next note is less nice, and will tell them they’ve already sent two, three, four or however many solicitations this calendar year. That means they’re wasting my donation, and If I get any more this year, they will not receive a donation to waste next year. One group actually sent us two identical solicitations on the same day — and both contained a prepaid envelope. Both were returned without a stamp covering the postal charges. There is some lag time involved with this process, but I believe I’m starting to see a couple of the worst ones taper off, and one local group has sent me an apology, with a promise of no more solicitations this year.
The Recycle Bin is a weekly column on what to recycle, what not to recycle, and why, in Brunswick. The public is encouraged to submit questions by email to brunsrecycleinfo@gmail.com. Harry Hopcroft is a member of the Brunswick Recycling and Sustainability Committee. This column is a product of his own research.
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