Here is another tip in the World With­out Oil realm.  (If you don’t know what World With­out Oil is, look back at this older post for a descrip­tion.) Kim and I are a young cou­ple who recently paid off a lot of debt and are in the mar­ket to buy a house in the not-too-distant future.  As such, we get a lot of snail-mail “spam.”  Every day credit card appli­ca­tions, ads for newly built hous­ing devel­op­ments, preap­proved loan offers, and other such things arrive in the mail­box.  Because most of it is crap and I am security-minided, all of this stuff goes into the shred­der, leav­ing a big pile of strips that the cats like to play with.  Most peo­ple, at this point, would throw away the mess, or at the very least put it in the paper recy­cling bin.  I end up using it in the fire­place.  There are a few good rea­sons for this:
* It’s free (to me–someone else paid the print­ing and mail­ing costs)
* Free is cheaper than $3/gal for heat­ing oil — if you burn it all at once, you get a nice flash of heat for about 5 min­utes, although it doesn’t last much longer than that.  Still–better than noth­ing.
* For longer-lasting heat, it makes great kin­dling for light­ing larger logs

It even has an added bonus from a side-effect:
* In the sum­mer, when it’s hot enough that a long-lasting fire would be silly, you can burn just the shred­dings, then use the ashes to pro­tect your gar­den (e.g. our tomato plants) from snails and slugs.  It’s effec­tively wood ash, which can be sprin­kled in a ring around the base of plants.

One thing to look out for when shredding/burning are those plas­tic win­dows that cer­tain envelopes have.  Increas­ingly, bill envelopes are using open win­dows (with­out plas­tic) or print­ing directly onto envelopes, pre­sum­ably to cut down on cost.  While, admit­tedly, it is small quan­ti­ties as com­pared to the rest of the paper, burn­ing plas­tic isn’t the great­est for the envi­ron­ment.  It’s usu­ally best to tear out the win­dows before shredding.

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Tagged as: ARG, wordlwithoutoil