We receive mail at home and at work six days a week but rarely consider the impact the postal system has on humans and the environment. The U.S. mail travels by truck, bike, mule train, or Segway (PDF), whether along dirt roads or super highways, to reach the densest city neighborhoods and scattered rural ranches. Figuring out the “greenest” way to get it there is a challenge that the US Postal Service (USPS) takes seriously. It’s also a challenge that the Smithsonian National Postal Museum turned over to a group of thirteen-year-olds.
Teens supervise the “invention lab” where museum
visitors try to create a “green” mail delivery vehicle.
The “test driver” in the lab coat makes sure the vehicles
are up to speed on the following criteria: safety,
reliability, speed, and cost.
The 15 “green teens” took charge of planning the Green Ways to Move the Mail Family Festival during a workshop in March 2009. Even the unflappable teenagers were impressed by the sheer size of the postal system on which we depend for birthday cards, coupons, Pottery Barn catalogs, and Netflix. With the world’s largest civilian fleet, USPS drives more than 1.2 billion miles each year. In 2007, USPS delivered to 147,992,522 addresses, and two million addresses are added annually. Despite recent drops in mail volume, the vast system that moves our mail has dramatic impact on the environment.
Teens can recycle their bulk mail or read magazines online, but none of us can immediately affect how mail gets to our door. So the focus of the Festival was not our personal behaviors. Rather, the program used mail transportation as a challenge to teach systems thinking, team work, problem solving, and interdisciplinary knowledge. By teaching others during the festival, teens honed their communication skills and tested out a day in the life of a museum educator.
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