Hi to anyone who's reading this!

I work at a community college as a cleaner, and I often find used envelopes in the trash (the nice yellowy-orange ones with bubble-wrap padding on the inside, or without padding, or priority mail ones). As a result of my environmental angst/hoarder tendencies I've been collecting them and bringing them home for the past few days. First I thought, "Great, now I have envelopes for shipping books!" but even now I have enough to last me for probably the rest of the year (I don't really ship that much of anything).

So I've been trying to scheme up a way to give them to other people so they can use them (granted they don't mind re-using packaging that's already been written on, whited out, had stickers on and tore off, cut open and torn up -- but still perfectly usable). There's no one in my life that could use a bunch of envelopes, but surely people from here could. Other than sticking an extra one in when a book is mooched, however, I can't think of what to do with them. I don't want to pay to ship just envelopes! It seems a little counter-productive.

Does anyone have any ideas? Or is this just a silly idea to begin with?

Eddie

Once I went to mail something in a box that had priority mail tape all over it, and the guy at the post office let me ship it at a different rate after I taped over the priority mail tape with brown tape (which is still see-through...). So I don't see why they wouldn't let you re-use them if you sharpie'd over their markings or turned them inside-out. But I only have that one experience. (I only have one or two of those envelopes anyways, which I can just use for bookbinding.)