RED rubber bands have been testing our tolerance for months, and now it seems that some have snapped.
The Royal Mail switched to red rubber for the bands it uses around post bundles 18 months ago to make them easier for postmen to spot and pick up when dropped.
The policy seems to have backfired, however, with the easily identifiable bands now littering every pavement. Millions of the 342 million bands used each year by the Royal Mail are being scattered on pavements up and down the country, inspiring a new sub-culture. The Royal Mail told The Times yesterday that its order to posties not to abandon the bands would be reinforced at team briefings, but few believe that it will end the epidemic of rubber bands.
As long as the postmen and women of Essex continue to drop the bands, Bob Russell, the Liberal Democrat MP for Colchester and long a rubber-band collector, will continue to find a use for the Royal Mail’s cast-offs. “It’s a bit sad really, but I just hate waste,” he said. “I pick the red bands up and use them for bundling up newsletters. My record is 37 in one street in Colchester. Bending down to collect them keeps me fit, too.”
One local radio station received bands from all over Britain after the subject was aired in November. One couple had found one while on holiday in Germany. Shani Ryan, the producer of the BBC Radio Essex Breakfast Show, said: “It was an innocent little listener’s e-mail that was read out one morning. We weren’t expecting a particularly big response, but we asked people to send in the bands if they saw one.
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“That opened the floodgates, and we got around 10,000, from as far away as Oban in Scotland and even Berlin. Eventually we had to call it off and we gave the bands to local charities.”
Meanwhile, an estimated 5,000 bands are dropped by postmen doing their rounds in the South London borough of Lewisham every month, and Steve Bullock, the Mayor, wants it to stop. “It all adds up to unnecessary work for us,” he said. “I think we all appreciate that postmen have to deliver an awful lot of letters in a short space of time but I’m sure they could be a bit more careful.”
As Lewisham Council announces its campaign against the bands, Julian McLean has a different solution. Mr McLean, of Wapping, East London, was “annoyed by all those stupid charity wristbands” and so began wearing a Royal Mail band six months ago. “I found it on the floor, they were all over the place,” he said.
He set up a page on the charity website Just Giving with a picture of his band and asked people to donate to the WWF. So far he has raised £84.62 of his £1 million target.
Royal Mail refuses to disclose how much it spends on rubber bands, but a spokesman said: “We use an estimated 342 million of them each year and we re-use the vast majority. They’re red precisely so that they can be spotted if they are dropped, and are more bio-degradable than standard bands.”
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Royal Mail donated 20,000 to the world’s largest rubber-band ball, which was flown to Arizona to see how high it would bounce. Sadly, instead of bouncing, the ball smashed into the ground at 400mph after being dropped from an aircraft and created a 9ft crater.
HOW TO USE THEM
CHOPSTICKS FOR BUTTERFINGERS
Use your rubber band to fasten chopsticks together near the top. Roll up the wrapper the chopsticks came in and shove it between them.
BUILDING A RUBBER BAND TANK
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Make a hole in a candle stub and push one end of a rubber band through the hole just far enough to push a match through. Pass the other end of the band through a cotton reel. Fix that end in place with a match that has been snapped in half.
Position it so that only a tiny part of the match is on one side of the rubber band. Then, using the long end of the match, wind up the band. The tank will trundle along on a smooth surface.
THE BEST WAY TO FIRE A RUBBER BAND
Hang a rubber band off the tip of your little finger. Shape your hand as if you’re simulating a gun. Stretch the rubber band around the base of your thumb and over the centre of your index finger. To fire, simply move your little finger.
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From Dad Stuff by Steve Caplin and Simon Rose, published by Simon & Schuster