Under the Sun
Mail amounts to more
than a hill of trashWhenever I'm away from home for long periods, the chore I dread most upon returning is sorting through the mail. Two weeks' worth usually fills a shopping bag. Not the cute kind with the braided-twine handles and stylish graphics that you get from boutiques, but the monster, heavy-duty plastic ones that department stores give you to lug home the pillows you bought at the sidewalk sale.
Some of the stuff the post office delivers is welcome. I love catalogs and frequently will request them for at-home window shopping. I also subscribe to a lot of magazines and journals.
Most of the mail, however, is unsolicited. I must be on the "soft-touch" lists because it seems that every charitable organization in the world asks me for donations. I get appeals from well-known groups, such as the Red Cross, as well as the obscure, like schools for orphans in Kentucky and Costa Rica. The latest modus operandi for inducing guilt -- and perhaps a check -- are address labels, usually tagged "a special gift, just for you." I've gotten labels decorated with whales, wolves, foxes and flamingoes, flowers, Olympic rings, Indian fetishes, butterflies, strawberries and blackberries, apples, tigers, big-horned sheep and marmots.
I suppose I could just chuck them in the trash can, but they've got my name and address on them. That introduces myriad issues, the foremost of which is that someone could retrieve them and use them for something weird or creepy. Plus, the labels would be identifiable trash, garbage that's clearly mine, and I don't want someone who lives near the Waimanalo Gulch landfill to get mad at me for creating more trash.
People there are irate enough as it is. Some of them say the city is reneging on promises to shut down the dump this year and they are tired of dealing with the associated smell and vermin. I don't want state Sen. Colleen Hanabusa accusing me of "environmental racism" because the dump is in a district where many low-income and minority groups reside.
The trouble is we're fast running out of space to hide our garbage and producing more of it at the same time. For one thing, it's difficult to buy a product without excess packaging. An ink cartridge for my printer came in a box four times as big as the cartridge itself. Inside the box -- impenetrable without a sharp device like an X-Acto knife -- the cartridge was surrounded by shrink wrap, then corrugated cardboard, more shrink wrap, cellophane and, finally, foil.
Few urbanites think much about trash, other than that it has to be jammed into the city-provided bin and wheeled curbside twice a week. My best friend and I were introduced to trash-thinking when we bought a house on the Big Island. We, like other rural dwellers, have to haul our own to the euphemistically labeled waste transfer stations and when opala removal is your responsibility, you try to limit intake. I've taken to refusing paper and plastic whenever possible and weighing products not only for quality and cost, but for what it comes wrapped in.
We live in a society that's geared to dispose. When a VCR breaks, buying a new one costs less than fixing the old one, so to the dump it goes. It's the same with mail. For whatever it costs a bank to send out thousands of credit-card offerings, it will make more in interest from those few who will bite, so to the post office go millions of sheets of paper and envelopes.
I have no complaints about spam. At least on-line solicitations are easier to get rid of -- unless, of course, there's an electronic landfill out there that's close to being full up.
Cynthia Oi has been on the staff of the Star-Bulletin for 25 years.
She can be reached at: coi@starbulletin.com.