A couple of months ago I was given a box with envelopes which had been kept by Verily Anderson, the late grandmother of my partner Eloise. A suitable 'inheritance', as I'm a keen re-user of envelopes. All 'No Junk Mail' stickers and other items I sell on the Stop Junk Mail website are sent in second-hand envelopes, for example. It makes perfect sense to me. Stop Junk Mail is about reducing paper waste, so why would I buy new envelopes if there are so many that can easily be re-used? Why spend money on plain envelopes if you can make original and much more colourful ones yourself?

I'm aware this a minority view. Modern economics teaches that re-using throwaway items such as envelopes is uneconomic, and many people seem to think that one's own actions have no impact on the environment whatsoever. Just the other day someone left a comment on Stop Junk Mail's YouTube Channel (forgot it even existed…) about my envelope re-use labels. The person's conclusion was:

"The efforts you're going to, although applaudable, are akin to a mouse peeing in the atlantic."

Now that's a view I can't understand. What's the problem with a mouse peeing in the Atlantic?

Granny Verily kept envelopes because it's easy to re-use them and because it's wasteful to just throw them out. Simple as that. Many of the envelopes Verily kept must also have had memories attached to them; some of them date back to the 1940s! Clearly, today's throwaway culture was alien to her. And I think she was right...

3½d (1955)

5p stamp (1958)

'Remember to use the postcode' (1970)

'Are you on the new voters list?' (1960)

'Private.' Full stop. (1953)

'Printed matter' (1968)

'Printed matter only' (1952)

6d + 1d + 2d (1952)

½d + ½d + 1d + 1d (1948)

'Immediate' (1948)

'First class' (date unknown)

'From Chatham House' (1955)

That's a full return address! (1952)

'Lettre' (1990)

'The Rochester Economy Label'… an early envelope re-use label! (1948)

An early telephone book (date unknown)

'Verily.'. Date unknown.

Here are 30 more junk mail envelopes (the first lot of 30 can be found here).

A while ago I started experimenting with making more or less useful things out of the bags full of junk mail I keep in my office. Often junk mail is made from perfectly good paper so re-using the stuff makes sense. As per usual I first had a couple of ambitious plans that hopelessly failed before I stumbled upon an idea that worked: making junk mail envelopes. It gives junk mail (and catalogues) a dignified second life and cheers up your post. Don't they just look great?

A set of five randomly picked envelopes can be bought from the sticker shop on the Stop Junk Mail website.

It's called Re-use those envelopes and that's exactly what the film is about. Paper waste is one of the reasons why I started Stop Junk Mail (the other reason is of course a dislike dislike of unsolicited, cheap and nasty advertising). And there's an obvious link between junk mail and envelopes; the 4.5 billion pieces of addressed junk mail posted through British letter boxes every year almost all come in an envelope. Re-use labels are a great invention. I post all items we sell in re-used envelopes, saving tons of paper and money.

With Christmas approaching rapidly it might be a good time to start saving your envelopes and getting some of these!

From today there are two new items in Stop Junk Mail's sticker shop return to sender labels and envelope re-use labels.

Return to sender labels are handy if you got lots of junk mail to send back to where it came from. Rather than writing 'Junk mail, please return to sender' on each and every envelope you can simply use these bright red 'lick and stick' labels. Envelope re-use labels are a smart way of re-using envelopes. It's almost impossible to recycle envelopes, but they are easy to re-use. Just put a gummed label over the old address and write the new address on it. It reduces waste and saves paper and money (as a label is cheaper than an envelope).

As you'd expect, the labels have been printed on 100% recycled paper.