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7 Things I Got Wrong About Throwing Away My Packages

By Jessica M.

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Last Updated Feb 5, 2026

Number 6 is the one that actually made me order something.

I order a lot online. Three or four parcels a week, sometimes more.

 

For years my routine was the same: open the box, scribble the address out with a black Sharpie, flatten it, put it in the recycling. I thought that was the responsible version. Most people I know don't even do that much.

 

Then I noticed something in the garage that made me go back through the whole bin.

 

I'm going to walk through the seven things I had completely wrong, because I suspect you're doing at least four of them too.

1. The Sharpie doesn't cover anything

I found this out by accident.

 

I was flattening a box in the garage with the afternoon light coming through the window behind it, and I happened to glance down at the label.

 

I could read my own address. Straight through the marker. Name, street, unit number, phone number — all of it.

Same label, same window. Sharpie above, Ink Guard below.

Here's why, and it's obvious once someone says it out loud: marker is ink that sits on top of the paper. The printed address is ink that soaked into the paper. Put light behind it and you see both. The marker was never covering anything. It just made it look covered.

 

Like taping a Post-it over a window and calling it a blackout blind.

 

I tested five different markers on a fresh label to be sure — Sharpie, a chisel tip, two cheap ones from a drawer, a paint pen. Same result every time.

 

"But mine are stuck to a box, not held up to a window."

 

Mine were too. That's less protection than it sounds like.

 

Cardboard gets flattened, torn and crushed — in your bin, in the truck, at the sorting facility. Labels lift off on their own once the box gets damp, and plenty of people peel them off deliberately before recycling. The moment a label separates from the box, it's a loose piece of paper again.

 

And you don't need a window. A phone torch held behind it does the same job. So does tilting it under a lamp.

 

Or skip the light entirely and just scratch at it with a thumbnail. Marker sits on the surface — on the glossy labels couriers use now, it comes away almost immediately. I'll come back to that in point 6, because it turns out most of the products sold to fix this have the same problem.

 

If you want to check for yourself it takes about four seconds. But you can probably already see it in the photo above.

2. It's not just the address

I assumed the address block was the sensitive part. Cover that, job done.

Then I actually looked at a label properly. There are four separate pieces of information on there:

  • Your name
  • Where you live — including the unit number, which tells someone whether you live in a house or a flat
  • Your phone number, printed below the address on most carrier labels
  • The barcode, which decodes back to the order itself

I'd been covering one of the four and feeling good about it.

See What Actually Covers It ->

Roll it, hold it up to the light, and if you can read a single digit we'll refund you and you keep it.

3. A shredder can't take any of it

I own a shredder. I bought it for exactly this reason.

 

It cannot shred a cardboard box. It cannot shred a pill bottle. It jams on a padded mailer and it doesn't cope well with a glossy label either.

The three things that arrive most often, and the one machine that can't take any of them.

Which means the shredder handles bank statements and tax returns — and almost nothing else that actually arrives at my door now. Statements come by email. Everything else comes in a box.

 

So the boxes went out with the labels on. The one thing I'd bought a machine to prevent, I was doing every single week.

 

I'm not telling you to get rid of your shredder. Keep it for the genuinely sensitive paperwork. But it was never going to solve the parcel problem, and mine had quietly become a thing I owned rather than a thing I used.

4. Mine lives in a cupboard, so I never use it

This is the part that actually embarrassed me.

 

The shredder is under the stairs, behind the vacuum, unplugged. Getting it out is a five-minute job before you've destroyed a single sheet.

You use the one that's within reach.

So the post stacked up on the kitchen counter instead, waiting for a Sunday when I'd have twenty minutes. Which was never. It just sat there for a fortnight at a time.

 

That pile isn't laziness. It's friction. Anything that takes twenty minutes and a setup gets deferred forever. Anything that takes three seconds and lives where the parcels land gets done automatically.

 

I didn't need more discipline. I needed the job to be smaller.

Cover Mine in 3 Seconds →

5. Shredding creates a second problem

I found this out from my council's recycling page, of all places.

 

Most kerbside recycling won't take shredded paper. The fibres are too short and it fouls the sorting equipment. So the bag of shreddings goes into general waste — and the entire point of separating it is gone.

Shredded paper goes in the bin. A rolled sheet stays recyclable.

So the machine was loud, slow, jammed constantly, couldn't handle the thing I actually needed it for, and turned recyclable paper into landfill.

 

Covering the address instead leaves the sheet whole. It stays recyclable. It goes in the right bin.

6. The cheap ones don't work on shipping labels

Once I knew privacy roller stamps existed, I nearly bought a $7 one off a marketplace listing.

 

Then I read the reviews properly. A striking number said the same thing: works fine on envelopes and bank statements, does almost nothing on shipping labels. Goes on grey and patchy. You can read through it. Comes off on your thumb.

Same label, same pass. The cheap one beads and skips on the coating.

Here's the reason.

 

Shipping labels aren't paper — they're coated. Most of these rollers use a thin oil-based ink that needs paper fibres to soak into, and a coating gives it nothing to grip. So it beads up, dries patchy, and lifts off.

 

One of the larger brands states it outright on their own product page: not for use on glossy or coated papers, as the ink may rub off.

Which is the whole problem, because coated shipping labels are the reason most of us need this in the first place.

 

If you've bought one of these before and been disappointed, it was almost certainly on a shipping label. It wasn't you.

See What Actually Works ->

Roll it, hold it up to the light, and if you can read a single digit we'll refund you and you keep it.

7. This is genuinely how identity theft starts

I'd filed identity theft under things that happen to other people, involving hackers and data breaches.

 

The FTC logged over 1.1 million identity theft reports in 2024. By the third quarter of the following year, reports had already passed that entire annual total.

 

But the number that changed my thinking was this one: identity fraud cost people $27.3 billion across 18 million victims in a single year, according to Javelin's research.

 

And a lot of it doesn't start with anything sophisticated. It starts with a name and an address that go together — which is exactly what's printed on the parcel in your bin, sitting on the curb, visible from the pavement.

 

It's called dumpster diving. No hacking, no technical skill, no real risk to the person doing it.

You don't have to be wealthy for someone to target you. You just have to be convenient.

What I actually use now

 

It's called Ink Guard. It works like a lint roller — you roll it across the label and it lays down overlapping CONFIDENTIAL text at different sizes and angles until there's nothing legible underneath.

One pass. Clean label ahead of it, nothing readable behind it.

I tested it the same way I tested the Sharpie, because I'd been fooled once already:

  • Held to the window at midday: nothing
  • Phone torch directly behind the label: nothing
  • Photographed and zoomed all the way in: nothing
  • Rubbed hard with my thumb: didn't move
  • Wiped with hand sanitiser, which takes Sharpie straight off: didn't move

Hand sanitiser lifts Sharpie straight off. It doesn't touch this.

It comes as a two-pack, which I thought was excessive until I understood point 4. One lives by the front door where I open parcels. The other's in the kitchen drawer where the post ends up.

 

You use the one that's within reach. That's the entire trick.

 

Each roller holds enough ink for thousands of passes, and it refills through a port on the side rather than being thrown away.

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I'm Not the Only One Who Gets It

After I posted about this on my Facebook, I had like 15 people message me asking where I got it. Here's what some of them said after buying their own:

 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Wish I'd bought this years ago"
"I used to spend 20 minutes every week cutting up labels with scissors. My hands would cramp up. This takes 2 seconds. Absolute game changer."
— Carol M.

 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Actually works unlike Sharpies"
"I did the light test like Jessica mentioned. Held it up to every light in my house. Can't read a single letter. Finally feel safe recycling boxes."
— David P.

 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Gave one to my elderly mother"
"My mom orders everything online and just tosses the boxes. I was so worried. Got her the stamp and now she uses it religiously. Such peace of mind for both of us."
— Patricia L.

 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "The Sharpie revelation was real"
"I tested my old method with a Sharpie after reading this. OH MY GOD you can totally still read it. I felt so dumb. Immediately ordered Ink Guard."
— Marcus T.

Test it yourself. That's the whole guarantee.

I'm not asking you to take my word for any of this. The point of this product is that you can check it in about four seconds.

 

Roll it over a label. Hold it up to a window. If you can read a single digit underneath — your name, a street number, one digit of your phone number — we'll refund you in full and you keep the stamps.

 

Open the box. Use it. Test it on your own post. Nothing to send back, no return postage.

 

Most guarantees in this category quietly exclude opened items, which makes them worthless — you can't test something without opening it. This one doesn't. Opening it is the point.

The gap between caring and being covered

You've read seven points about your recycling bin, so you clearly care about this more than most people do.

 

That was never the issue.

 

I cared too. I scribbled every label for years and felt responsible about it. I was making it look like I was handling it while actually doing nothing at all.

 

The difference between those two things is a two-pack of stamps and three seconds per box.

 

Go and hold one of your old labels up to a window if you want to be sure. Or just look at the first photo again — it's the same result.

Get My Two-Pack — 50% Off →

Roll it, hold it up to the light, and if you can read a single digit we'll refund you and you keep it.

 

INSURED shipping · Refill cartridges available