Shtipoof No. 2: the forest to mailbox to landfill pipeline

Next time you're in the Ashland post office on a business day, park yourself in the lobby for a few minutes and watch. You'll see a flow of people unlocking their P.O. boxes, pulling out a bundle of mail and then crossing the linoleum to toss half of the bundle into a recycling or trash bin. This goes on minute after minute, hour after hour, day after almost every day, in nearly every American city and town.

Now consider the Sunday newspaper, if you get one. It might start out an inch and a half thick. Do you haul it in from the box, drop it on the table with a loud slap and prune out an inch of ads, flyers and supposedly special sections to get to the parts you want to read? And does that culled-out bundle go straight to a trashcan or recycling box, mostly or completely unread? In this situation, you might have active possession of the bundle for as much as 10 times longer than the five-second process at the post office.

Think about the life cycle of this material. Softwood trees like poplar are germinated from seed and then planted symmetrically in carefully prepared plantation soil. For 10 to 20 years they're watered and fed petrochemicals until they reach a diameter of 12 to 16 inches (a "60 Minutes" documentary some time back reported that 17,000 of these logs are needed to produce a Sunday edition of The New York Times). Then they're cut like cornstalks and trucked to pulp mills to be chipped, stewed and infused with more petrochemicals and, when you want a whiter white, the chlorine that produces a big slice of dioxin contamination around the world. More cooking, pressing, stretching and cutting before another voyage, usually by diesel 18-wheeler, to paper brokers and printing plants across the country. Then another trip or two through high-tech, high-energy machinery for printing and folding into envelopes, newspapers and magazines, followed by many more oil-fueled road or air miles to reach your mail or newspaper box.

Then it's up to you to transport the product from incoming box to outgoing trash. After years of practice, you can do it in seconds, unless you stop to read this stuff, which, after years of drivel, you rarely do. The trash goes to the curb to be picked up by yet more trucks, then mostly (in spite of the ebb-and-flow of recycled paper markets) to landfills, where it's buried beneath enough material to cut off the oxygen that would otherwise dissolve it.

Twenty years growing in a tree plantation. A month or two in processing plants. Five seconds in your hand at the post office, or maybe a few days lying around your house unread. Tens or hundreds of thousands of years clogging up a landfill. And rivers of oil and toxic chemicals to move the material from one step to the next.

This easily qualifies as shtipoof No. 2. Shtipoof No. 1, "Pushing around empty steel boxes," was described in a Dec. 20 column, available at www.dailytidings.com. Shtipoof? It's a Stupid Habit That Isn't Part Of Our Future. I suggested then that a good way to identify shtipoofs is to "imagine what a visiting researcher from Mars, an interplanetary anthropologist here to figure out the human species, would think. If Martians have a jaw, and something you say makes it drop — if after carefully listening to your explanation, this Martian researcher says 'You people do what?' — you probably have a shtipoof."

Why has this one gone on so long? Probably because, within the economic framework we've come to accept, it pencils out. Remember that direct mail marketers, depending on their product, are thrilled with a response rate of 1 to 5 percent. So when only 95 percent of their fiber tonnage travels straight from tree plantation to landfill uninterrupted by the human eyeball, we have "success." If you were our Martian, do you think you might be a little baffled by our accounting practices, especially the value we assign to different resources?

I began this column after hearing an National Public Radio report Tuesday that the U.S. Postal Service is losing more money every month, partly because struggling companies are cutting back on promotional mailings. "And here's yet more bad news," the story began, pointing to the painful layoffs ahead for postal workers.

My two questions are these: Is there a painless alternative? And how bad is it to be forced to give up this distinctively clueless way of torturing the planet?

Jeff Golden is the author of As If We Were Grownups, Forest Blood and the new novel Unafraid (with excerpts at www.unafraidthebook.com).