Paper round
On why you haven't seen my smiling face in your letterbox
One of the sure-fire signs that it is election season are the mountains of paper that start turning up in your letterbox from candidates. Candidates of all stripes will send you glossy flyers, A4 pages, addressed mail, the works. There are also the ads that go into local newspapers, or in some cases, inserts or whole wrap-arounds. Election season is a boom time for the local printing and advertising industry.
You may have noticed that you haven’t seen anything from me. That’s deliberate. I’ve done a number of campaigns in my time, both for myself, and for others. They chew through stacks of paper. Appalling amounts. Despite claims that it can all be recycled, we know that most of it won’t be. The glossy colour cards are the worst. Even if it all had zero impact on landfill, there is still the costs involved in printing and distributing all this material.
I’m running for a council with Environment in the name. It seems counterintuitive to use all this energy, ink, paper, petrol to try and promote myself to a role where I want to reduce our use of all those things. I made the decision early that I wouldn’t partake in the paper arms race. I’ve made sure there is plenty of information about me and what I believe in on the internet, and I’ve made myself available through community meetings, and also people emailing me directly. There’s also the information in the candidate booklet that gets sent out to every voter - hopefully there is enough in that to at least give people an overview of where I stand on the issues.
As with not paying Facebook to advertise, I may be shooting myself in the foot with this. I’m at peace with that. Even if I don’t get elected, I’ll be able to sleep easy, knowing that I didn’t chop down a bunch of trees in my quest to save the planet.