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Been flying a drone over landfills for a year now. I'm taking high resolution photographs of all the address labels I can find. Wrote a script to do OCR on the photographs and then export that into an Access Database. Been mailing out flyers to positives asking folks to do better recycling.

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So you're mailing a bunch of flyers to people you know don't recycle? The project is cool but that struck me as particularly ironic, assuming your intention is to help minimize waste.

Maybe his flyers are biodegradable made from plant cellulose. You never know!

He probably fedex overnights them on 32lb bond California Redwood sourced stationary.

Or maybe the expected value of sending out the flyer is higher than the cost of the flyer paper not being recycled.

... I, on the other hand, see there an excellent opportunity for lead generation in the document shredder business.

AHHH but now you need a commercial pilots license since your drone footage is used for commercial purposes.

Honestly there is no shortage of commercial pilots sitting around just waiting to get a bit of extra cash to observe your drone operation.

No shortage of starving commercial pilots who will work for peanuts.

Do you check for your own flyers in landfills?

Ooh, and he can send another one that says "second notice" (or third, etc) without actually needing to store data on each recipient. :P

too... meta... does not compute

Yeah. This is why I shred any document with my name on it. If it's junk mail and has my name, it's shredded. If it's anything, and it's got my name on it anywhere, it's shredded. You can't be too paranoid.

You realize that if you are getting junk mail with your name on it, your name and address are almost certainly in a commercially available database that is accessible to anyone with a credit card? I think what you are doing is equivalent to locking the barn's skylight after the horse has bolted.

Sure. I do know that my address and name are out there. But security isn't about perfect protection. If there was such a thing as perfect defenses, we wouldn't need security. Shredding documents with my personal details is about stopping low-hanging vulnerabilities. Thieves who are picking through garbage to find identity theft victims are not the type who are going to pay money for corporate database access.

Is it difficult to break into all the homes in your neighborhood and shred the phone books?

I don't have a landline. I can't imagine my cell # is in a public phone directory.

The whats?

- Plenty of packages can't be recycled

- Plenty of recycling is diverted to garbage because somebody put garbage in the recycling stream

- Plenty of recycling facilities are at capacity and cannot process all of the recyclables, and divert them to garbage

Whoa. Cool. What motivated you to start doing this? Got a write up about it?

Playing along - my trash goes into bags, but my recycling goes unbagged into a bin. If the recycling company my municipality runs or uses actually just dumps my recycling into a landfill, you've been mailing flyers to the wrong address.

Or, on the other hand, perhaps you'd appreciate being informed that your "recycling" service is a scam.

You must need a very high res camera. Very very high res indeed.

Or just fly low and slow :-)

Has anyone replied to your mail? What has the response been like?

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