My mail box is full of trash again.📪

I get tired of coming home every night to find my mail box stacked full of circulars, advertisements and other junk. Time Warner Cable, as they have done for 12 plus years now, continues to send me more advertising fliers to sign up. Sometimes it’s so full of trash that the poor mail man has to smash it into my mail box, especially those bigger newspaper style circulars.

While I will glance at some of it, most of it goes straight to my paper trash milk crate where I collect up my paper trash to dump in the recycling dumpster at the Park and Ride. While not all of my paper trash is unwanted fliers — a fewer pieces are legitimate non-confidential mail and food boxes and other paper packaging — it’s still such an enormous waste of wood fiber to be filling up my trash can so quickly.

After only a week and a half, my paper trash was full enough that I had to compact it down with my boot the other day.

It’s just absurd how much trash there really is. While I do “recycle it”, when you toss it in the recycling dumpster and it goes to paper mill, “trash doesn’t just disappear”. Some of the fiber is recovered and used to make cardboard and paper, some might even get bleached and turned into medium-grade office paper. But a significant portion becomes pulp and paper waste, and is ultimately ends up in the Colonie Landfill.

In the summer months, I use some of the waste paper to start fires while camping, but even that can be overwhelming, as paper doesn’t burn that well unless it’s dry newspaper or crumbled up well. The newspaper type waste paper can probably eventually be used for starting woodstoves or livestock bedding when I own my own land, with rest just burned for disposal, but having so much paper is just obnoxious to dispose of whether you live in the city — as I do now — or use some of it in the future when I live out in the country.