The Gods of Small Things – Episode 1: The Mail Carrier was here

We are the God of Small Things, because Small Things is what most of our life is made of.

Here is an example of a very small thing.

Did you notice?
Did you notice the elastic bands laying on the frozen ground the other day while walking to get your latte at your favorite neighborhood Cafe??

<<<Here they are. Do you remember now?

Do you remember that you have been seeing elastic bands on the ground for years now. Have you ever wondered where they came from???

They show up here and there, apparently falling from the sky like manna.
There are days I find lonely singles and days I find 4 or 5 rubber bands bunched up in one small spot.

“But of course”, the Mail carrier was here.
Yes, your mail person, working for the United States Postal Service uses rubber bands to  bundle all the pieces of mail that he/she is going to deposit at one specific address. Much easier that way: grab the bundle, remove the elastic band, push the mail bundle in the mailbox and on to the next mail box.

When he/she removes the elastic band before shoving the mail bundle in your mailbox, he/she drops the elastic band on the ground and leaves it there.

Let do some number crunching:
Staples sells One quarter pound bag of elastic bands for $2. and a full one pound bag for $5.30.

The US Postal Service employs 650,000 employees. Let’s suppose that half of them are assigned to mail distribution.
Further more, let’s suppose that a one pound bag will suffice to tie the mail delivery of one mail carrier for 2 months.  The estimated accounting cost in rubber bands for a year comes to $1.8 Million/year.  This is an unrecoverable cost.

For the USPS, the cost of those rubber bands is part of doing business, in the same way as  its fuel costs. Since most of those rubber bands are simply dumped on the ground by mail carriers,  this accounting cost does not integrate the cost of environmental damages created  by the leftover rubber bands. The same way as the USPS does not account for the environmental damages created by the emissions of its fleet of vehicles.

Apparently the British Postal Service has the same practice.
According to the Blog “Streamlining Solutions”, the Royal Postal Service bought 872 million rubber bands in 2008 at a cost of £1m.  See “The ubiquitous red rubber band” for more details. I am wondering if  the practice of using rubber bands to bundle mail survived the Independence War with England???

How do we change this situation?

Here are a couple of  possibilities:

• Reward the mail carriers for recovering their rubber bands.
• Reward consumers for bringing back recycled rubber bands to their local USPS Branch.

The idea is to assign a value on recycled rubber bands so that mail carriers and consumers are motivated to pick them up.  This is exactly what Terracycle is doing with packaging.

When USPS mail carriers  collect and recycle their rubber bands and shut down the engine of their delivery truck when idling for more than 30 seconds, those simple acts repeated thousand of times make a difference on our environment.
We make a difference when  millions and millions of people change  small things in their life. That is all it takes.