It’s well known that the City of Yorkton wants more people to recycle. As reported last week in these very pages, they’re running a survey to increase engagement and participation in the curbside recycling program. For example, Yorkton wants you to throw all of your papers into a blue bag so it’s recycled instead of tossed in a landfill, especially since landfills are getting increasingly expensive to expand thanks to provincial regulations.
Following the survey, I walked around my neighborhood and noticed there was a very important way that we can increase the amount of recycling engagement while also beautifying the city.
There needs to be paper recycling bins at every community mailbox. I’ll go one further and suggest that Canada Post should be required, on a national level, to install a paper recycling bin at every single community mailbox in the country.
After all, it was their cost-cutting measures that led to the community mailboxes in the first place. We used to get unwanted mail right to our door, which meant it was easy to transfer things like shady credit card applications into our big blue bags. Now we get them at the mailbox, and as it turns out, people don’t like carrying mail they don’t want back to their house.
I realized this when I went to get the mail and discovered that my own community mailbox was covered in discarded mail, making it look for all the world like set dressing for a post-apocalyptic film. The only thing missing was a newspaper declaring what, exactly, the aliens were after as they destroyed the city. No, it was just flyer day and apparently multiple people on my street are not interested in a great sale on blueberries. Or maybe the aliens invaded in order to get cheap blueberries.
It was a disaster, but if you had a recycle bin there it would be better. At least people would have a place to throw the paper instead of just dropping it like a six year old that saw a bug on their sandwich.
It’s easy to blame people for not carrying their mail home with them. Presumably, when they travelled to the mailbox, they had to assume, on some level, that they are carrying something home with them. If that’s a bundle of letters, a long awaited parcel, or some stuff they don’t want, they’re still probably going to have to take that home. Instead they’re just throwing it around, which is, at a bare minimum, extremely rude, especially to every neighbour who has to wade through their piles of garbage in order to get to their own mail, before apparently not learning their lesson and throwing their own unwanted mail on the ground.
We have a problem that extends beyond just Yorkton. Every city with these boxes will have people who just throw their mail around like idiots. We have a solution, a recycling box of some kind, which will divert the paper from a landfill and give people a place to toss their unwanted mail. Sure, some people will still somehow miss the bin, but at least most people will still be able to hit it and it’ll be nice for those of us currently carrying home our unwanted mail like human beings capable of the bare minimum of respect for the environment and each other.
But I don’t think it should be the city’s problem. This was Canada Post’s idea and it should be their problem to solve. They need to know they’ve created a tornado of discarded paper.
They also need to know that there is an excellent sale on blueberries, if the aliens haven’t bought them all and the store is still standing.
