Death to Blow-Ins

1. Blow-in cards are awful.
2. We can put an end to them.
3. Let us make them stop.

Environment - Pollution

Blow-in cards: those annoying loose subscription forms that fall out of magazines, forcing us to either squat or bend over to pick them up -- or be a party to littering.

Take those blow-in cards and deposit them not in the nearest trashcan, but in the nearest mailbox. Publishers will have to pay for each blank business reply mail card sent back to them, and blow-ins will become economically infeasible.

The economics of blow-in cards are pretty compelling to magazine publishers. But here's the thing -- the USPS charges the source of the business reply mail *by the piece returned.* Here's a list of the fees , anywhere from $.008 to $.60 per blow-in card. When compared to the infinitesimal cost of blow-in cards that must underlie the systematic littering we're talking about, that could get to be fairly whopping.

With roughly 400 million magazines being produced a year , at, say, 3 blow-in cards per magazine, that's 1.2 billion blow-ins blanketing the US in the course of a year, covering around 21 billion square inches of ground (until you pick them up - thanks!).