I was talking With Miriam last night and I was telling her about the email spammer in England and one here in the US that a bunch of hackers signed up for hundreds and maybe thousands of catalogs, information requests etc. The end result being that they got so much mail through the postal service that they couldn’t find the mail that was legitimate… Sort of a real world mail denial of service attack. Well Miriam thought that was pretty funny and in turn she remembered a story of a guy years ago that burned his junk mail in his wood burning stove in the house. Which suddenly made me think about the implications.
It was like a light bulb going off 🙂 you know junk mail is free…. what if you turned it from an annoyance and liability to a positive benefit. What if you could just feed your junk mail to a big shredder that spit out little logs of bailed paper at the other end.. kinda like a hay bailer.
Next lets sell this device to thousands of people that now solicit junk mail as a free source of energy.. you could heat your house, run a steam engine generator or a stirling engine generator, heat water… before long we could run america on the junk mail senders dollar. They not only buy the paper but ship it to you at their cost. How considerate and nice is that.
I think I need to do some experiments with shredded papper and see how burnable it is 🙂 Maybe I will start selling paper bricks and actaully make some money.. I could make a little automated shredder/bailer and stack them like bricks and sell little 6 x 6 x 6 bundles of paper bricks in front of grocery stores.. for a few bucks a bundle. The postal service would deliver my raw materials to my doorstep and they would get paid to do so by the sender.
So what do you think? I don’t see a down side here 🙂
Poisonous fumes from the toxic heavy metals used in the inks in many of the advertising inserts… Also, some of the plastics probably would not burn all that cleanly in a normal furnace.