Flyers are not made from trees, that is an old myth. Paper mills are shutting down everywhere as there is no demand for paper. There is an opposite effect to letting trees grow. Europe is running into this problem. Trees get old and do not consume carbon dioxide, thus producing less oxygen. Europe is protecting their trees, to the detriment of the forest.
Winnipeg has the Thursday Fliers. Belleville has the Thursday fliers. That is door to door, has been for decades.
Junk mail. The PO has a legal obligation to deliver it. Companies pay for it and they have to deliver it. Take that out of my mail and Brian could stop by my house once a MONTH with mail.
Parcels? Why do I need a mail carrier walking by 250 times a year, for the five parcels a year I get? That is a red herring.
Mail delivery is a 20th century concept. Like dial telephones, 80lb B&W TVs, banker hours, etc.
@cumos55 wrote:Will there be a garbage can near to that community mailbox setup?..... or ... Will there be garbage floating in the wind?
This ^^^^ WILL be an issue in some locations, the unlucky person who wakes up one day to find a clusterbox being installed at the edge of their front lawn will wake up a few days later to a pile of junk mail scattered about.
They will probably put my box across the street on the High School property, any tossed flyers there will just get hidden under the trash the kids already toss there.
@mr.elmwood wrote:Flyers are not made from trees, that is an old myth. Paper mills are shutting down everywhere as there is no demand for paper. There is an opposite effect to letting trees grow. Europe is running into this problem. Trees get old and do not consume carbon dioxide, thus producing less oxygen. Europe is protecting their trees, to the detriment of the forest.
You need to get out more. By out I mean out in the boreal forest that is being cut at ever increasing rates.
The NEW myth is that computerization would reduce paper use. Quite the contrary, paper use has risen dramatically over the past 40 years. Newsprint production is dying but fine paper production never stops going up.
You can use recycled materials to make cardboard boxes but all that packaging inside the carton is made from virgin stock.
Some numbers here:
http://forestethics.org/paper-the-facts
http://environmentalpaper.org/our-resources/top-ten-indicators/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_and_paper_industry
Consider the source but regardless of a bias it's clear that we use more paper every day.
Western Europe hasn't been a significant producer of paper products since the 19th century.
Rec, mths are just what they are. There was the long standing belief that the rain forest in the Amazon is the lings for the earth.
OOPS! We were wrong.
Scientists have since found algae bloom, in the arctic that do a better job than forests ever could.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/giant-algae-blooms-thriving-under-thinning-arctic-sea-ice-1.123821...
Declining pulp & paper: http://www.cepi.org/topics/statistics/preliminarystatistics2012
Indications are that paper and board production by CEPI member countries fell by in the region of 1.7% in 2012. It is estimated that CEPI member countries produced around 92 million tonnes of paper and board in 2012, resulting from some adjustments in production capacities with closures amounting to 2 million tonnes and new capacities or upgrading of existing ones accounting for close to 1 million tonne.
It is estimated that the production of pulp (integrated + market) has decreased by up to 1% when compared to the previous year, with total output of approximately 38 million tonnes. It is estimated that output of market pulp increased by about between 4% and 4.5%, while integrated pulp output decreased by 3% in 2012 when compared to 2011.
It is estimated that consumption of paper for recycling by CEPI members fell by between 1% and 1.5%.
Based on the cumulative data up to the end of the third quarter of 2012 it is expected that total paper & board deliveries for the year will have fallen by over 2% when compared to 2011.
It appears that the overall consumption of paper and board in CEPI countries in 2012 decreased by between 4% and 5% when compared to 2011. - See more at: http://www.cepi.org/topics/statistics/preliminarystatistics2012#sthash.KsSIABw7.dpuf
Well targeted advertising pays for itself.
Ya know those privacy agreements ya get with loyalty cards? Well, the Air Miles tells you that they sell your buying information to anyone and everyone who asks. The MLCC knows that the average customer shops in four different stores, what they buy, and when.
So, they then turn around and target mail these people. Customers get all excited with teh Air Miles coupons they get. I had people running into the store demanding I sell them all eight items they had Bonus Air Miles coupons for.
A 1/4¢ worth of paper in their hand and they were spending $250. Throw in the envelope and postage and we were out 60¢.
mr.elmwood wrote:
Indications are that paper and board production by CEPI member countries fell by in the region of 1.7% in 2012.
I don't think 'recped's' comment that: "By out I mean out in the boreal forest that is being cut at ever increasing rates" is necessarily at odds with your comment above.
I don't mean to derail this topic into another area altogether, but all you need to do is spend a couple of years on Vancouver Island (especially the mid- to north-Island areas) to see the scars on the landscape continuing as if there really were no tomorrow. It may not be going into pulp and paper production, but it's going somewhere, and I suspect that somewhere is China, to be turned into building materials.
Instead of processing a reasonable amount here with some controls over the how and why, companies are just removing vast tracts of our forests to cash in quickly, and sending them overseas to let someone else add the value.
One trip to Cathedral Grove tends to change your perspective.
Sorry -- I had nothing to add vis-a-vis the Canada Post discussion. 
Actually, it does all tie in. It is the evolution of our society, what increases in value, what decreases in value.
Yes, I agree, everything has value, to someone. To someone else it has no value. My argument is, who gets to be right?
One side says yes and the other says no. Who gets their way when each side is correct?
Yes, I agree, everything has value, to someone. To someone else it has no value. My argument is, who gets to be right?
One side says yes and the other says no. Who gets their way when each side is correct?
I dislike pillaging of precious resources
I am with you until this. There is a large segment that believes we have only begun to start scraping at what the earth has to offer.The resources exist. Exist for what? To look at?
There are currently more deer, running around in the United Kingdom, than have ever existed in history. "Save the deer! Save the deer!".
It has been postulated that there are more hydro-carbons on this planet than mankind can ever use. More species of animals and insects have vanished, before mankind evolved, than exist now.
Blame humans? Maybe in the last 200 years. Before that, Mother Nature sure had a hand in things.
We are currently in the longest cold spell of the Earth's history. Even scientists are backing off the human theory. The earth was a lot warmer 1,000 years ago, then, a lot colder 400 years ago.
It is one heck of a complex moving algorithm.
@mr.elmwood wrote:I dislike pillaging of precious resources
I am with you until this. There is a large segment that believes we have only begun to start scraping at what the earth has to offer.The resources exist. Exist for what? To look at?
There are currently more deer, running around in the United Kingdom, than have ever existed in history. "Save the deer! Save the deer!".
It has been postulated that there are more hydro-carbons on this planet than mankind can ever use. More species of animals and insects have vanished, before mankind evolved, than exist now.
The real trouble is that when man interferes on a widespread, or global scale, he creates imbalance, and in some cases outright desolation. Start with the deer, since you've mentioned it. Why are deer rampant in the U.K.? Because predators have been decimated (or eradicated) by man. I doubt people see many wolves around England anymore, let alone lions (yes, there used to be cougar-like lions in England).
Here's a thought experiment: take away all people from England and put back a few hundred breeding pair of deer predators. In a few decades nature would re-establish a balance. Precisely the same thing happened on Vancouver Island over the last century -- there was actually a bounty on cougars (the main predator of deer there) for many decades. People didn't like them, were afraid of them, and the cougar were attacking livestock. Now? Deer are all over the place, walking all over the streets in Victoria, relaxed as you please.
Why are many artificially introduced species a serious problem in some areas (or even whole countries - like rabbits in Australia)? Mainly because man either forgets about balance and predators, or thinks his needs are foremost, or just doesn't think at all about the consequences.
There's a plant that was introduced as a pretty garden variety in Ontario a few decades ago, called purple loosestrife, that is now strangling wetlands everywhere and pushing out native species. There's the yellow broom that is now the scourge of the West Coast that someone thought he'd bring from Scotland for his garden. There are the zebra snails, the asian fish species, and good grief, even pythons roaming around in Florida, and the list goes on. Fortunately there are sometimes also people who come along and work to try to correct these ghastly mistakes.
Vanishing species are part of the 'survival of the fittest' plan inherent in genetics (or maybe it would be better to say, adaptation of the best). Those that are not well adapted to their environment or conditions will ultimately fail as a species. The spontaneous culling that goes on all the time helps to maintain the overall balance of the incredibly complex system that makes up the living earth. That is the beauty of the balance of life on this planet, where one or more creatures (or plants, etc.) exist to feed another, and the apex predators depend on the whole system below them functioning in order to survive. Take that culling away and we'd be shoulder-deep in creeping, crawling organic beings with no purpose in the larger cycle of life.
As for earth's resources, we (i.e., each current generation scraping away at them) tend to forget that it's just possible human beings may still be on this planet 10,000 years, 100,000 years from now or more. And some of those people may need to have a little left of those resources to use. Just because it exists doesn't mean we have to tear it all out at once, or over a few short decades -- to make as much money as fast as possible, and to heck with the next generation, let alone the next 100 generations. Has mankind learned nothing in the last 200 years from such plundering activity?
My feeling is that man is at a point of spectacular opportunity for utter disaster or complete triumph. Our species has a short window of opportunity, probably over the next 50 to 100 years, to either become truly adaptable to living on this planet, or to basically devastate almost every corner of it. I completely believe that mankind now has the technological and scientific tools and knowledge to be able to solve this puzzle of living within the balance of the planet, as they say, in a small footprint. The problem is how to create the will to do so.
Mankind -- I should say modern, post-18th century mankind -- can't seem to live in the environment without having to take everything possible for his own use, amusement or profit at any price, and **bleep** the consequences as they used to say in the 19th century. I'm afraid the "profit at any cost" motive remains the most prevalent, even now in 2013 (soon to be 2014). The real challenge of the 21st century, as I see it, is not to make more money from scouring more parts of the earth, but to find a way to merge respect for the whole living organism on this planet with the technological achievements of the last century. Put another way, can we merge the teachings and wisdom of native people who understood how to maintain themselves in the natural world, with the scientific and technical knowledge we now have?
And this treatise will surely get me kicked off this thread...
