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Giving Our Junk Mail a Second Chance


Photo: Everett Bogue


Like most journalists, we are fairly regularly inundated with PR materials for various products, services, and, especially, books. Like most journalists, we give these things a quick once-over, realize they have nothing to do with anything we ever write about, and promptly toss all the packing, and all of the press releases, and all of the accompanying background material, and the sturdy folder all that paper came in, into the trash — or, if we’re feeling responsible and industrious, into the recycling. Sometimes we hang on to the product itself, often we toss it on a free-stuff table, and occasionally we throw it out, too. Which we were about to do yesterday with a set of books that arrived unbidden and irrelevantly on our desk — until we noticed the titles: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Composting, Water, and Energy. At which point we laughed a little bit, and then we threw them out.

Giving Our Junk Mail a Second Chance