July 28, 2007 / Park Slope / Perspective / The Brooklyn Angle

Time to ‘band’ together in Slope

By Gersh Kuntzman

The Brooklyn Paper

The Brooklyn Paper / Julie Rosenberg

An environmentally sensitive tyke shows off dozens of postal service rubber bands that collect on her street.

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What is the postal service’s official policy towards litter? It’s a fair question to ask now that Park Slope’s streets are being blanketed by dozens — hundreds, thousands! — of thick, brown rubber bands that are carelessly dropped every day by letter carriers.

I appreciate that neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds, but will nothing stay them from littering?

The Attack of the Ubiquitous Rubber Band is one of those things that once you see it, you can’t not see it anymore. After I mentioned the situation to a few friends, they all started reporting similar band droppings up and down their block. Neighbors have responded in their own way. My neighbor stuffs them into a vacant mailbox in his apartment building. Another friend is holding them in a box, claiming that he will soon dump them on an unlucky clerk at the Ninth Street postal station. My daughter put a dozen or so in an envelope and mailed them to the president. Of the United States.

I called Postmaster General Jack Potter’s press office and got nothing. But then I remembered Tip O’Neill’s famous axiom that “all politics is local” (or was that “all bars are local”?) so I called the postal station on Ninth Street for an explanation of why local mailmen are such litterers.

The number was busy all day. I finally reached USPS spokeswoman Pat McGovern, who treated the question like a Soviet-era aparatchik in a Solzhenitsyn novel (“Ivan Denisovich can’t possibly be in the gulag, because that would be a mistake — and we never make mistakes, so Ivan Denisovich is not in the gulag”).

“It’s unlikely that the rubber bands are from us,” McGovern first said. “Letter carriers are instructed to recycle and reuse rubber bands — and they do.”

When I reminded McGovern that they don’t, she said she’d call back.

“The station manager told me that he would talk to the letter carriers about housekeeping issues,” she now said. “Our policy, clearly, is not to litter.”

That was three weeks ago and the problem has continued unabatted.

©2007 The Brooklyn Paper

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