What a waste!

I’ve written about this before but I think it bears repeating because things have changed somewhat. I’m talking about junk mail. I would suggest that it is worth reviewing you junk load at least once a year. Why? I’ll come back to that.

First, I’ll redefine what I think junk mail is. It is mail that arrives unasked for that gets stripped of its plastic wrapper and goes straight into the recycling bin. The wrapper goes into general waste. Very, very, very occasionally something turns up that turns out to be useful but generally, not.

So, what’s the problem? It’s two seconds work to strip and bin.

The problem, of course, is that you are then paying to have that waste disposed of. Think of it as legalised flytipping. You might think that it doesn’t cost so much but in an office of twenty you will often find that a good part of the recycling bin is full of unwanted adverts, unread magazines and the stuff that comes tucked inside them. And from an environmental point of view, tree have died, been processed into paper, printed and then gone straight into the bin. Much of the stuff isn’t even good for composting due to the gloss and colour.

The other thing is, important stuff can get lost in among the junk. I found my voter registration form this morning whilst I was picking up piles of junk mail to photograph. (I’m working from home and therefore don’t have access to the recycling bins dotted around the office.)

In fact the stuff in the photograph bears looking at. Some of it is addressed to the former occupant of my house – four years gone. When I remember I send these ads back with ‘No longer at this address’ scrawled across them. I have been doing this for four years. I’m still getting stuff. This is complete junk and a total waste for the sender too.

Then there are take away menus. This is inevitable. I live in a student area. Students live on takeaways. Leafletting my street every other month is cost effective because the student have probably lost the menus in that time. My method with these is to immediately throw away anything not in ten minutes walking distance. I used to keep the local ones. Now I don’t. I throw away all the local ones too and look the menu up online. If they don’t have a website they don’t get any business from me. (It must be said that the Bilash (red (meat) and green (vegetarian) menus) is an excellent take away but I do resent the number of leaflets I get from them.)

There is the Natural Collection catalogue. I’ve bought stuff from them, on and off, for years. I thought I asked them to stop sending me catalogues last year when I did a concerted campaign to stop my junk but I can’t find my email so maybe not. An amail has gone today. The send me regular alerts on at least two of the email addresses anyway. I don’t need the paper copy.

And then there is Christian Aid. This was the charity I donated my sponsor money to when I lived on £1 a day earlier this year. Now they email me regularly and send me lots of paper. I get the emails. I don’t need the paper. I hadn’t even opened them. They were just sitting on the junk pile. Now I’ve taken them apart, put the freepost envelopes for reuse and binned the rest. I know that any charity wants more supporters and more money from their current supporters but I would actually prefer them to spend the money I donate on helping people in need, not printing and posting stuff to me. I get the emails! In the past I made a one-off donation to a charity that I suspect spent all my money on sending me letters asking for more cash. They didn’t get any more cash. An email has gone out to Christian Aid.

The point is, in a year a business will have contact with a great number of new organisations. A good number of those will take the opportunity to send their marketing to you in paper form. Those need to be culled. Also, we asked a number of membership organisations to only send one magazine. We are a small office. We can share. At one point I think we were getting six copies of The Environmentalist. The problem here, I guess, is perhaps adverisers need a certain number of paper copies to go out before they are willing to buy space. Whatever. You are probably going to have to remind some organisations to which you subscribe that you really meant, ‘Only one please.’

Times are difficult and the one thing that doesn’t go down in a recession is the marketing budget but that doesn’t mean that any organisation wants to pay for getting rid of junk paper. So, to add to the improvement log:

• Rather than just bin the rubbish, spend a day asking people not to send paper marketing – you can offer your email address as an alternative
• Revisit the organisations that are sending you magazines. Ask them to keep it to one for the whole organisation or none at all and read it on line.
• Talk to the people who send you catalogues. In some cases the paper catalogue is useful but often it is much easier to search and buy on line. Again, cut the number of catalogues received from each supplier to one or none at all.
• Make sure that the residual paper is recycled.

More on carbon

I do not apologise for being a little obsessive about carbon. I tend to think of myself as being a little ahead of a trend that everyone will, sooner or later, have to accept.

I use the word ‘carbon’ as shorthand for two linked issues. When we look at environmental issues there are usually linked problems, resource and pollution. Resource is to do with the tendency to take so much of a commodity that it is driven into scarcity. Pollution is the effect on the wider environment caused by the waste products of this overuse. When we look at ‘carbon’ the resource issue centres on the fact that we are using astonishing amounts of a finite resource, fossil fuel, to maintain our lifestyles. The pollution issue is the vast amount of greenhouse gases we are releasing into the atmosphere as a result of this.

In my job I talk to lots of people about environmental concerns. Everyone is aware of climate change but awareness of the fossil fuel depletion is almost non-existent. Last week I spoke to a group of a dozen young men in the construction industry, a sector that must be fundamentally involved in the movement towards a lower carbon society. They were bright and focused on doing the right thing environmentally but both completely unaware of the fossil fuel issue and suspicious of the reality of climate change. This week, unprompted, fossil fuel depletion was nominated by a delegate as the single most important sustainability issue at a workshop I was involved in and I was more than a little surprised. I’ve spent quite a lot of time wondering why people seem to be unaware of our predicament. People are naturally aware of the high petrol prices at the pump and increasing energy prices and yet seem not to connect this to a fundamental supply difficulty. George Monbiot recently pointed out that despite being very aware of the issue the last government was not publicizing it at all. The original document is also well worth a look bearing in mind that the IEA have since suggested that peak oil occurred in 2006. I haven’t seen a major change in emphasis with the coalition.

I wonder whether the government is also grouping the two issues as ‘carbon’. There is, potentially, a major resource crisis looming. Our energy security in the UK is falling. Last year we imported over 40% of our natural gas having been very comfortably self-sufficient until recently. This information can be found on the DECC website but is certainly not ‘in your face.’ In addition, making money from commodities has increased over recent years as the financial industry has pushed for and obtained (dangerous) levels of deregulation, so any increase in public awareness could escalate the problem – fossil fuels taken out of circulation to be used as money substitutes resulting in higher prices resulting in even more fuel taken out of circulation.

The results of the reluctance to talk about ‘peak oil’ and the public’s perception that climate change is a government scam perpetrated to justify taxing us at higher rates is that these linked emergencies don’t seem to be being addressed openly. Conspiracy theories abound on the internet but I do suspect that the government is trying to do the right thing (tackle the linked carbon issues) by introducing seemingly random pieces of a jigsaw of legislation. The reason conspiracy theories are so popular is that we all hope that there is someone somewhere who is competent and knows what they are doing. This is what I am hoping for here.

I recently wrote about the government’s Green Deal, which is a glimmer of hope, and this week I would like to mention the Defra consultation on measuring and reporting GHG emissions by UK companies, closing on 5^th July. In the report, ‘The contribution that reporting of greenhouse gas emissions makes to the UK meeting its climate change objectives: A review of the current evidence’ the authors note that the ‘reporting of GHG emissions is considered an important part of the GHG management cycle and a tool for embedding sustainability into a company’. I think that the hope is that a clear awareness of their emissions will remind organizations that, in a time of escalating prices, they are throwing away money on inefficiencies in their energy use and that should translate into a desire to minimize those costs with the desirable knock-on effect of a conservation of resource and a minimization of pollution.

If this is to be an effective measure the best of the four reporting options on the table would be the one that captures the largest number of organizations. For this reason alone I will be ‘voting’ for Option 3: Mandate under Companies Act for all large companies, as it will capture information on between 17,000 and 31,000 public and private companies. Option 2, Mandate under Companies Act for all Quoted companies, would pick up around 1,100 companies but not large private companies and Option 4: Mandate under Companies Act for all companies whose UK electricity consumption exceeds a threshold, would capture 4,000 or up to 15,000 with a lowered threshold. Option 1, Enhanced Voluntary Reporting, would have the disadvantage of all voluntary schemes; there is no level playing field and those who need to do it most will be most reluctant. In addition, if we appear to be taking the softly, softly approach to the issue there will be no apparent urgency to reporting.

My preference, when discussing anything at all, is to get as close to reality as possible. Philosophically, we cannot ever know what reality is. We attempt to understand what is actually real by building models, telling stories or, as they say these days, framing. Given that absolute reality is unknowable I still prefer not to have the ‘facts’ obscured. I don’t want anyone to reassure me that everything will be fine when it won’t. I want to be treated like an adult, someone who will recognise her responsibilities and act on these. Trying to make decisions based on incomplete information is part of life but having information ‘hidden’ from me does not reassure me at all and makes me distrust those who are supposed to be representing me. It would work far better for me to have our government say something along the lines of, ‘We have put too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we are having to use more and more expensive (in terms of money, pollution and energy input) fuel which is in increasingly short supply and we must cut back on our use of fossil fuels hard and urgently.’ Of course this would probably be political suicide and so I suppose I support what any government will be prepared to do, the slow piecing together of the carbon control jigsaw. If only it were more comprehensive and quicker coming into force.

Resource

I’ve just spent the last three days presenting the IEMA approved Internal Auditor course to seven delightful delegates from various sectors. I love presenting in-house courses where everyone knows each other and they have lots of experience and requirements in common but courses based in ECUS with randomly selected delegates can be wonderfully enlightening. They may sometimes be more difficult because you may be trying to meet the needs of a delegate from a major manufacturing company whilst not neglecting the needs of a delegate from an office based company but the synergies you get can be marvellous. On this course we had some real experts in their fields who were very generous in sharing their knowledge and not only was it enlightening, it was fun.

I’m often surprised by how much people already know but I’m also occasionally disconcerted about what they are not aware of. On most of our courses we link waste and resource use, and sometimes quality as poor quality management can lead to a lot of waste.

On this particular course we talk about major resource issues that we are or will soon be facing. Some resources are, of course, renewable, but only if we manage them sustainably. Examples might be timber, soil, fish and so on. Some things are not renewable except in geological time scales, for example, metals and minerals. Some are not renewable at all and will eventually be exhausted, for example helium, oil and coal. All of these things, to one extent or another, are essential to our way of life. Rare earth metals, for example, are used in tablet computers, hybrid cars, wind turbines, catalytic converters and the more efficient solar PV panels.

Many of the resource issues are exacerbated by where the deposits of the materials are and the environmental impact of their exploitation. The vast majority (~97%) of rare earths are now sourced from China and with this effective monopoly comes increasing concerns for availability. Every time I have googled ‘China, rare earth’ in news over the last several months there have been stories about this issue. Today the news is of a huge increase in taxes making the cost per tonne more than $100,000. The availability and price of oil is also very much affected by the location of most oil reserves.56% of world oil reserves are in the Middle East, currently suffering from a period of unrest.

My big surprise was that when I asked my training group who was aware of the idea of peak oil no-one said yes. Resource depletion is a massively important issue that will affect us all in many different ways and peak oil is one of the most urgent and important. With reference back to my resilience post of a few weeks ago, imagine how we would live without cheap fossil fuels. Our whole complex society depends on each complicated component being sourced from wherever it can be made most cheaply and delivered Just In Time to wherever it is needed. This can only work in an era of cheap oil. Currently oil is not as cheap as it was, bouncing around $100 per barrel.

At the same time that there is a global problem with oil, there is a national problem. The UK was, for a good amount of time, energy self sufficient thanks to the North Sea oil and gas fields. This is no longer the case. Last year we had to import more than 40% of our gas. 40%!! No wonder the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) produced The UK Low Carbon Transition Plan in 2009. It wasn’t just about climate change. To a large extent it was about keeping the lights on for all of us.

I spend a fair amount of time keeping up with what is happening with resource issues and I occasionally read through the comment threads as well. When I’m feeling strong. More often than I care to remember there are major skirmishes about how best to deal with these, whether governments should try to legislate to bring down consumption and hence protect out current comfortable lives for longer or whether the market should be allowed to operate without control. The argument is that as prices increase due to scarcity the almighty market will step in and cause the production of more of the important commodity. This only works if there is more of the commodity available to be extracted within a workable timescale. With oil it takes around ten years from discovery of a resource for an oil well to become fully productive. Oil wells are also no longer being drilled in easily accessible places where the return on investment is high so prices have to be consistently high for a long time for new well to be worth developing. If this does not work then the market is supposed to rush out and produce hyper-efficient vehicles, power supplies and the associated infrastructure. Also, presumably, people will be induced, by the cost, to look at minimising their own energy usage.

This is a wonderful idea as was the idea of taxing pollution sources with a tax escalator on fuel prices. The recent UK budget has, again, dealt a blow to the theory. Oil prices are rising so the chancellor has stepped in and instead of raising tax by the expected 3p/litre has reduced it by 1p/litre. I know that all drivers and transport companies are struggling at the moment with high prices but how is the omnipotent market supposed to save us all if the government steps in whenever we reach a level where it should start to work?

Thoughts from a motorway service station

Some interesting thoughts from Alison:

It was a hot and sticky August day and the threat of rain was in the air. We pulled off the M40 on the way back from another carbon-intensive wedding in London to fill up our (reasonably fuel efficient) car. My husband dealt with the fuel payment (can it really cost £70 to fill up a 1.9 litre engine car these days?!) and I walked back to the actual services to buy some lunch.

The services resembled a cross between Alton Towers during the holidays and that old favourite TV programme ‘Supermarket Sweep’. There was a hideous queue for the ladies, every seat (inside and outside) was taken with families on their way to or on their way back from holiday destinations and people were literally throwing themselves on food wherever they could grab it from.

But quite aside from the enochlophobia that suddenly came over me I was completely overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of consumption that was going on in those 50 metres squared. Cappucinos, fast food, packaged sandwiches, sweets, crisps, fruit (not much), canned drinks. I stopped and looked around me and could not see one single person without their mouths open stuffing food and drink into it.

I freely admit that on this occasion I joined them. I usually try and make our own lunch/dinner in the car, not because I’m an eco-warrior, but because I refuse to dish out for the extortionate prices they charge you at the service stations (talk about a closed market). I paid £10 for two lots of sandwiches and two bags of crisps – ouch.

If this much consumption of food and drink and this much waste was being generated at this one small service station off the M40 at that precise moment in time (which probably accounted for 0.00001% of the UK’s population), how much was being consumed and wasted around the world at that moment? A scary thought.

So what can we do? Make our own sandwiches? Well yes, but that may not be the long-term, universal solution of choice. Somehow we have to wake people up to the reality of having a finite amount of space and resources on this earth. Organisations and the culture therein can play a big part in this – what type of culture do you advocate at your organization? Do you have a Green Travel Plan but your Directors still turn up to work in their 3 litre engine sports cars? Do you order in food for meetings from local companies but then always thrown half of it away?

We have to learn to complete the sentences which we are beginning to start. “We have a Green Travel Plan…..and everyone in our company from the top to the bottom is committed to trying to uphold the plan and reduce carbon emissions”. “We order food locally…….and have implemented a system to ensure that we do not over-order and that leftovers are distributed to staff”.

We are still thinking one dimensionally about resource efficiency and consumption – it is time we stopped leaving things unsaid.

Paper towels vs air dryers!

A few weeks ago my colleague, Alison, identified the question, 'are paper towels or air dryers better for the environment?' as one of the most frequent queries she encounters. I don't have a scientific answer for you yet, just another link from the Guardian where Leo Hickman reports 'Dyson and Kimberly Clark in hand to hand combat over paper towels'. This is fascinating and well worth a read, not least because here in full view is a wonderful example of why you should be careful when looking at environmental claims. Essentially Kimberly Clark (KC), a major producer of paper towels (and tissues, loo-rolls, feminine hygiene products and nappies) has published research claiming that warm air and air jet dryers increase the hygiene risks. Dyson, the manufacturer of the Airblade, has responded by saying that their dryers have independent hygienic credentials and have a carbon footprint 70% lower than paper towels. I haven't studied any of the studies used to make these claims and you really need to in order to properly assess the validity of the conclusions drawn about the environmental claims. Dyson compares its environmental performance against 'virgin paper towels' whilst KC remarks that paper towels can be recycled once used. Both of these comments are valid but will affect carbon footprint calculations. Obviously both companies will choose the framing conditions to suit their products. How does an Airblade compare with use of recycled paper towels? How often do KC's paper towels get recycled?

The main point of issue, the hygiene performance, is also worth a look. The comments to Leo's article were very sensible (I haven't read all of them) and pointed out a number of things. One is that our hands are always covered on bacteria. Washing does not remove all bacteria. There is an interesting post here which tells you how to wash your hands and comments, 'the surfactant action of soap helps the running water flush the germs away. That's how it works. It's purely mechanical'. So, as someone in comments to Leo pointed out, the minute you touch the door handle on the way out your hand will be contaminated with whatever was on the last person's hand. Not everyone washes their hands effectively. Not everyone washes! This is not to say that the hygiene of the drying method is not important but that it is not the controlling factor for how clean your hands are when you get back to your desk. The differences in hygiene reported are immaterial in risk terms.

For what it's worth, my preference is to use an airjet, followed by one paper towel, followed by wiping my hands on my clothes, followed by a warm air blower. The clothes option only works when I'm wearing jeans and I haven't had the hygiene risks assessed.

Water!

I'm having another week staying in a hotel and, the TV being full of stuff that will make me grumpy, I am spending my sad lonely evenings (and mornings) reading blogs and environmental news stories. This one from the Guardian is interesting. As the author notes, we have made great strides in understanding carbon emissions but in the UK we use a lot of water and we generally haven't addressed this at all. This article is about industries that use a lot of water but even those that are not water intensive could do with taking a look at their water use. It's an untapped source of money savings.

Sorry.

Selling the perfect food factory - Comment from Alison

There appears to have been a shift in TV adverts selling food. And it seems to have happened rather abruptly. One day I am being bombarded with the health effects of buying and eating certain breakfast cereals, snacks, yoghurts and the like eaten by perfect people and perfect families in beautiful natural surroundings, and the next I am being ushered into witness the delights of the food factory and/or fields themselves.

Selling food on TV has always had a strange fascination for me – perhaps because I like food, or perhaps because I find it strange that we have so much food and so many different brands that cheese can no longer just be cheese. When I was 8 or 9 I would draw the final snapshot of TV food adverts. My favourite was “Du pain, du vin, du Boursin”. Even that advert has now had to change to differentiate itself and become darkly humourous with the addition of “du Tracteur” to the end of the sentence. I’m not sure why anyone would link being run over by a tractor with a French soft cheese, but then I’m writing about it here, so it must have made an impression….

Anyway, back to food factories. Anyone who has ever been to a food factory will know that they are interesting places. My first visit was to a frozen pizza factory in Germany when I worked there for a year as a trainee accountant. I didn’t eat frozen pizza again for a long time. This was not because the factory was in any way dirty or unhygienic. Quite the opposite. It was spotlessly clean and sterile. All the employees were covered from head to toe. There were, in fact, more machines than there were people anyway. And my lasting memory is of huge vats of tomato sauce and grated cheese. In short, it completely destroyed my view of how pizza should be made (in a stone oven, outside, somewhere warm in Italy). I was horrified by the industrial nature and scale of food manufacturing. And it is a memory that has stayed with me for a long time.

Recently this memory was compounded by my other half’s visit to a chicken factory. Once again he said it was spotless. But the way he described the chickens being killed, plucked, sliced and diced and then packaged put a grim picture in my mind. Mass production of food is not pretty.

Yet the TV adverts say otherwise! And that is where my problem lies. The images portrayed to us by many food producers selling their wares on TV at the moment are simply not factual. Bakers dancing round a warmly lit bread-producing factory with smiles on their faces and loading individual pieces of dough into baking tins; salad growers picking individual salad leaves by hand whilst singing; chip manufacturers adding a dash of seasoning to individual frozen chips in a factory that looks more like it should be on a children’s cartoon. Food factories and commercial agricultural farms are simply not like this. And spare a thought for the workers in the factories and on the farms. I can guarantee they do not spend their days laughing, dancing and singing. In fact of the 1 billion poorest people in the world, I understand that over 50% of them work in food-related industries.

So is this a form of false advertising? Perhaps. There are many other issues at stake here as well, such as society’s demand for fast food that is not fresh. The demand for cheap food. The necessity of feeding nearly 7 billion people – it can’t necessarily all be done organically on local farms.

But that’s not really my point here – it’s the false image we are providing to the potential consumer of the product. Everyone should have the opportunity to visit a food factory and make their own minds up, but we should ultimately all be aware that food production is no different to the production of any other commodity these days.

Resource issues

There have been a number of discussions recently about resource issues. It is constantly in the news but never anywhere near the top level. During the various courses we run, particularly waste awareness courses, we look at resource efficiency and speak about fossil fuel (the UK's natural gas production has been declining since 2004), water (the south east of England is officially water-stressed) rare earth depletion and food security issues.

Peak Oil, something that has been causing some concern for a while, has finally caused Lord Hunt, the energy minister, to meet industrialists to calm rising fears over peak oil. According to the Guardian's report 'the government has agreed to undertake more work on whether the UK needs to take action to avoid the massive dislocation that could be caused by the early onset of 'peak oil'.' This follows on from a taskforce report in February which warned that Britain is unprepared for [peak oil and recommended packages including legislation, new technologies and behaviour-change incentives.

Peak Oil is a fairly well-known threat. Less well known resource issues have been raised by Sciencebloggers. Ethan Siegel is fascinating about helium, why we have any at all on Earth, why we need it and why it is a non-renewable resource. Dr Isis writes about 'why your medical care depends on weapons grade uranium'.

Business Week reports on further developments in China's management of various important metals including the rare earth elements so important in our modern technology and the Times updates us on the potential for phosphate depletion, a potentially disastrous issue that has been creeping up on us for some time now.

Finally, information about food security in the UK has been very nicely summarised in a one page document by DEFRA which the BBC publicised last year.

I don't have any particularly cheery words to say about any of the above other than to say that DEFRA seems to be more optimistic than I feel, and I really hope they are right.

Drowning in junk mail

There have been a lot of articles in the papers recently about junk mail. It used to be that we all wrote letters. These days there are not so many letters but we still want the option of having our Mothering Sunday cards delivered (trip out at lunchtime planned for Catherine and me to buy cards!) and this won't happen unless there is a nationwide service. It feels like unsolicited mail has increased perhaps because in a recession, companies need to get information on their products out to us. In the three years I have been in the house I have only once bought something from unsolicited mail so that is an awful lot of trees cut down to make instant recycling.

From my personal point of view the increase will just mean I put out the paper recycling bin twice as often. I have a canvas bag hanging on the back of my door which I sort junk into directly and I transfer this to my wheelie bin every other week. My issue with it is the amount of needless waste produced that my council then have to deal with, and the stupid use of resources to produce something that I regard as a nuisance.

There are some things that can be done and over the last three years I have cut down the unwanted material that comes through the door. You need to be aware that junk comes in different varieties.

The unsolicited mail that comes from the Royal Mail and can be stopped is unaddressed. If there is no address on the mail or it is addressed to 'the occupier' then you can contact Royal Mail and opt out. The details of how to do it with all the warnings about the information you might miss can be found at their website.

If you are getting junk addressed to you, either by name or to 'the occupier' followed by your address then Royal Mail is obliged to deliver it. It is, in fact, unlawful for them not to deliver it. In those circumstances you can contact the mailing preference service who will warn you about the great opportunities you might miss but give the option of, again, opting out of receiving their junk. On the same website you can find a telephone and an email opt out as well. This will cut down a lot of unsolicited mail although companies that you have bought goods from will continue to send their catalogues. This site will also allow you to stop advertising mail to former occupants of your house.

The third thing to do is to contact the people sending you unsolicited mailings directly. I have done this successfully with a number of companies. Usually I send a polite email asking the company not to send me any more catalogues. This works for companies I buy from too. I ask for an email catalogue rather than a paper one, not least because I am more likely to buy online from catalogues than send a hard copy of an order but also because I can delete anything that I am not interested in. This does not work for business addresses sadly or the ECUS paper recycling bin would be a lot more empty.

Yet another thing I do is to return mail for the people who lived here before me to the sender. I am never likely to buy a BMW. There is no point the garage sending out regular invitations to the former occupant. This has worked well.

The final thing is to put a notice on your door asking people not to deliver unsolicited mail. Apparently this works rather well. Stop Junk Mail will sell you a letterbox sticker or you can do your own. I am going to do my own so that I can say no to commercial leaflets and to free newspapers but yes to community information.

I suppose one more thing to think about. Maybe we should think about writing letters again. The immediacy of email is great but I've got two computer stacks full of no longer accessible emails and even if I eventually get them back, emails tend not to be things you treasure or even place a lot of importance on. You can see this in the weighting given to letters over emails in the 'real world'. I have sent many emails to my MP and my Prime Minister over the years but the only reply from the PM was when I composed a letter, printed it out, put it in an envelop, put a rather nice stamp on it and posted it. I've received very few replies to my emails to my MP.

I'm quite happy with the move to email catalogues and two sentence emails but I love to receive letters. Perhaps I should think about sending some.