Over the years, I've found some creative ways to use junk mail.

For a bunch of years, I used to take junk mail, say from Publisher's clearing house as an example.

I'd fold it up and stuff it in a Postage Prepaid envelope from the credit card of the day, and mail them that stuff so that they'd have to pay for the postage of my publisher's clearing house junk as it came back to them, not to mention the person that would have to open the email determine that they the Publisher's Clearing House processing center had in fact received junk mail.

Then they would have to throw it in their trash, not mine and put it in their land fill not mine.

This seemed to work pretty well, but I started to get a little lazy with my junk mailing process. Truthfully, there was just too much, and I usually stripped out anything that had my name or identify on it so that some employee from Publisher's wouldn't use my name and apply for a credit card or something. I just sent the non-personal fluff to them.

These days when energy prices are outragious, I've taken to creating Junk Mail Brickets.

First let me say that I drink too much Diet Coke (Coke Zero to be precise as I was poisoned by the regular variety of Diet Coke about a year ago.)

So I get lots of these refrigerator friendly empty boxes of Diet Coke.

I take these boxes and stuff them full of junk mail.

Stay with me now this serves two useful and practical purposes.

I take the boxes once stuffed very very full and dense, and I burn them like a log in my fireplace during the winter time. When they are stuffed tight they actually burn hot and slow just like a log would and they help heat my home. I don't cut down trees to burn or anything, I use the dead limbs and trees that fall down naturally in the fireplace. I have a nice energy efficient heater, but the fireplace burning junk mail and dead trees serves to take the edge off in the cold Georgia winters.

It also serves to destroy any trace of my identity that came in the junk mail and might be used by an identity thief.

Plus, it saves my local landfill the large amount of bio mass that would take centuries to decompose. (Note many landfills are conteplating building clean burning incinerators on site that could produce energy themselves to sell to the grid, but most don't have these yet.)

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