Eco Geek Says It’s Time to Stop Sending Letters

Yesterday, the price of stamps went up again by a penny. It wasn’t all that long ago that you could send a letter for 25 cents, and now it’s 42 – a pretty sharp increase in such a short amount of time. Of course, part of that is due to the fact that we now use electronic communication so much more often, and that is a good thing for the earth – it means far less waste ends up in landfills.

Eco Geek thinks it’s a fine time to stop sending letters, and they’ve provided a list of ways you can avoid using stamps: through scanning, online bill pay, e-cards, video letters, choosing postcards instead of letters when you do have the urge to do it the old fashioned way and finally, avoiding air mail at all costs. Makes total sense, right? Especially the air mail bit – what a waste of carbon emissions. People are very impatient these days.

So why is my eyelid suddenly twitching? Why do I feel a sense of dread, like something is terribly wrong? Oh, right – I was an English major. I’m a literary and history dork. I have a passion for all things romantic and old-fashioned, and that love of parchment paper and quills and envelopes sealed with wax is completely at odds with my desire to be more ‘green’. I am a collector of old, dusty, well-worn books and a lover of language. I am a scholar of the Italian Renaissance, and wrote my thesis on a long-dead European daughter of a pope. I hate acronyms and techie newspeak (or what nervous parents refer to as NetLingo) like ‘LOL’, ‘BRB’ and ‘AFAIAA’. When I use them, I do it with sarcasm, but despite that, a little part of me dies every time.

In this way, I represent the resistance to change that’s making it difficult to get a momentum going in this fight against global warming and everything that goes along with it. I treasure old things, and mourn the loss of the art of letter writing. I’m sad that kids are no longer taught cursive handwriting in school. I think it kind of sucks that typing has taken over as the dominant form of nonverbal communication. But, I don’t want to be one of those people that holds us back from moving into an age that could save us from ourselves.

I think it’s okay to write handwritten letters every now and then. We just need to make up for it in other ways. For example, I’m funneling my love affair with old things into a sort of recycling effort. I choose second-hand before new, any time I get the chance. I keep odds and ends like pretty soap wrappers and nicely printed cardboard product packaging to use for handmade cards. I don’t like the idea of a future where kids don’t even know how to write words out, and can only type them – so I want to make sure that those kinds of skills get passed down. I’m afraid of the truth in fiction like Fahrenheit 451, 1984 and even the action film Equilibrium.

Essentially, I will be one of those people who fights to preserve some of the personality and history behind written communication, but I’ll do it in such a way that prevents me from being part of the problem.

What say you? Will you give up hand-written communication for the environment?

Link [Eco Geek]
Image credit: Ballantine Books

If We Said Sayonara to the Penny, the Earth Would Thank Us

If you’ve got pennies in your pocket and a way to melt down metal, you might want to go ahead and do that: the metal made to make them is worth more than the pennies themselves. One hundred pennies could get you $1.40 worth of zinc. Seems like a big waste of money, doesn’t it?

Furthermore, zinc mining is, as Eco Geek put it, “an environmental disaster”. From Eco Geek:

The demand for zinc, mostly due to growth in China, has skyrocketed, and wasting the metal on a coin that is, in general, a nuisance, is foolish economic and environmental policy.

Unfortunately, there’s no quick fix. Switching to the nickel as our cheapest unit is confusing, especially in places with uneven sales tax. Transactions would, according on a bill proposed by Representative Jim Kolbe (R - AR), be rounded to the nearest five cents. But people aren’t a big fan of paying more for a certain amount of stuff…even if it’s just cents.

If we did make the switch, it would only affect cash transactions; credit card purchases and interest payments would still be made to the penny. Many other countries have dropped their lowest coin without much trouble, but Americans would undoubtedly raise a ruckus about occasionally paying a few cents more than they would otherwise. This, regardless of the fact that most of our pennies are sitting in fountains, jars and between our couch cushions, and when we drop them, we rarely bother to pick them up. That’s America!

Link [Eco Geek]

Photo credit: Flickr user totalAldo