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The Truth About
Rubber Bands found in the street

Where do those street-strewn rubber bands come from? Quality strong rubber bands, clean, apparently newly-dropped, are mysteriously present in many of the streets of towns in the UK. Is it just a UK thing? Or, do these rubber bands fall like rain in any urban environment in any country?

You may be interested to know, I have the answer to this mystery! Most rubber bands found in the street are dropped by postmen! How about that?!

It's true! Those early morning deliverers of letters, working for The Post Office, are the cause of the phenomenon. Those couriers of postal items are indeed the abandoners of rubber bands.

If you feel this is a stretch of the imagination, you can get some verification by walking to the Post Office Sorting Office, where you're likely to see a car park full of post vans which are stationary and the ground littered with a profusion of rubber bands, some of which are rather old. The style of rubber bands found there is the same as that of the ones found elsewhere in the streets, and different to what you might expect to get if you bought a pack of a thousand jumbo assorted rubber bands from WH Smith

I don't suppose anyone's grumbling about the free supply of Post Office issue rubber bands found in the street. After all, it's nice to get something for nothing, and these items of lost stationery are found at random for the wise to pick them up to keep for when necessary. It's a bit like the free ballpoint pens given away by Barclays Bank

The supplementary mystery is really more a question of why don't the postal rubber bands get reused? Surely it would be more cost-effective to take the rubber bands back to the sorting office and re-use them on future batches of mail? Recycling makes sense, but reuse makes even better sense.

This may seem a mystery, but for a much bigger postal mystery, see why close down profitable local post offices?!

Other useful references: Post Office , Stationery Suppliers , Save Our Post Office, and Business

An earlier hypothesis that the rubber bands were being dropped by leprechauns was already in considerable doubt because of this consideration: If leprechauns were leaving rubber bands in the street, wouldn't they have been GREEN rubber bands?