Is the post office your future recycling center?

Whatever you do, don't ask me why we're not doing this yet. It seems like a ridiculously simple idea, yet somehow, the largest and most effective sorting industry has yet to get in on the recycling game.

Yes, I'm talking about the post office. Sure, they've got their problems, but you can't say that they aren't awfully good at making billions of little bits of stuff go to the right places.

And, really, what is recycling (and reuse) but getting little bits of stuff to the right places.

Sherwood Forlee submitted the "Just Mail It" program as a "greener gadget" at the Greener Gadgets conference, and I recently found it and was struck by the simplicity.

I told Sherwood that this would be even simpler with an embedded RFID tag, and he said that, indeed, would be a slightly better solution, if the post office was ready to accept and read them.

But the idea is the same... to drop small recyclable items with high resale values -- picture: cell phones -- into the mail box for recycling.

Yes, it would decrease the per-phone recycling profits (and yes, they do make a profit on phones). But it would greatly increase the number of phones recycled, and reduce the age at which devices finally find their way out of junk drawers.

The concept could be expanded beyond cell phones to include small electronics that invariably end up sitting in junk drawers for a decade before finally hitting the landfill.

The solution is convenient enough for people to actually participate in.