Day 5: Charity junk mail from Amnesty

Today's discard is a piece of junk mail from Amnesty.

I don't think they've sent it to me in particular: it hasn't got my name on.

Many addresses ago, I used to donate to Amnesty. Then they sent me a yellow envelope full of photos of dead people, with the cheery message 'Your holiday photos are inside'.

I haven't donated to them since then, and I don't really want to get back in touch with them now either. It's not as if there's a shortage of charities to donate to after all.

After checking through the letter for any personal details to shred, I thought I could use the white envelope, either for lists or with an address label.

The rest could be recycled, and it was good to read that there's no need to tear the window out of window envelopes.^*

^*Unfortunately the first advice I read was wrong: according to Zero Waste Scotland, you do have to tear the windows out before recycling envelopes: https://wasteless.zerowastescotland.org.uk/articles/what-to-do-with-paper.

So I've just got that wrong, but at least it was only one of them.

I looked up paper recycling on this handy website: https://www.recyclenow.com/ but then was happy to discover there was a paper recycling point in my closest collection area, that I hadn't even noticed before:

Strangely, it seems that while the letters go into the paper recycling, the envelopes go separately into the mixed packaging recycling containers, along with the cardboard and tin cans.

Here are the instructions for the paper recycling:

And here are the instructions for the mixed / packaging recycling (mostly readable):

UPDATE: I went back there this morning with my pizza boxes to see if I could tear the window out of that envelope, but it's long gone, buried under loads of other stuff. Hopefully I haven't destroyed the planet with that now, and if I have, well, sorry.

Still, it's good to find this so near my house, and I know I'll have plenty more paper I can come back with. I'll make a page about my local recycling later.