Wallet Mouth

And now for a bit of enveloping minutia

Ever wonder about the recyclability of envelopes with plastic windows in them? I know some people throw them in the trash because they think the plastic renders them useless for paper recycling. I don't do that, because my understanding is that the envelopes are still recyclable, but I have always wondered why.

In her blog Fake Plastic Fish, Beth Terry sheds some light on the subject: recyclers "accept the plastic windows because they are easily separated from the paper during the pulping process, and the plastic washes away." (Of course, then, as she notes, there is that niggling little question about where "away" is.)

Another thing I didn't know is that some of those plastic windows aren't actually plastic, but specially processed paper called glassine, and that some envelope makers nowadays offer windows made of corn-based PLA, which is compostable in certain (limited) facilities but still problematic.

Stop paying for junk mail

Don’t you hate it when you buy one thing from a company, once, and are subsequently doomed to forever receive its catalog?

For Christmas one year, Mr. Wallet Mouth gave me a sweater from web retailer Athleta; now our mailbox gets a steady stream of women’s clothing catalogs—in his name.

I’ve been fed up with junk mail for a while, and my feeble attempts at opting out haven’t yielded great results (of course, it doesn’t help that I haven’t repeated those efforts since we moved a couple years ago). So I was happy to learn about this month’s Junk Your Junk Mail campaign from Carbon Conscious Consumer (or C3), a project of the Center for a New American Dream.

I used C3’s free web form to generate a bunch of opt-out letters and took the pledge saying I did. I encourage you to do the same. Also be sure to check out the link to petition lawmakers to create a national Do-Not-Junk registry, essentially a Do-Not-Call list for your mailbox.

If all those opt-out letters don’t do the trick, I might pony up the $41 to have 41pounds.org work its anti-junk-mail magic, which it says will get rid of 90 percent of unwanted mail for five years.