Looking for Boxes – earth friendly moving and packing

I have been considering moving and started thinking about ways to make this move more earth friendly. My first thought was that we will need recycled boxes. Well, it turns out that I really am thinking of are boxes made with a high percentage of post-consumer fiber content. Here is an informative article from Greenpeace that helps understand the issues around paper recycling.

Buying eco-friendly shipping boxes isn’t as easy as you might think. Strange because corrugated cardboard has a very high rate of recycling success. According to the corrugated.org “Corrugated fiberboard is more likely to be recycled than any other product, surpassing glass, aluminum and plastic. Today, 76.6 percent of all corrugated is recovered for recycling – up from 54 percent in 1990.” They also go on to say that 63% of old corrugated boxes get recycled into containerboard – used in making many new boxes.

These days many companies seem to market themselves to “out-green” their competitors, so you would think that boxes would be sold with clear information on the percentage of post-consumer materials but strangely this hasn’t been my findings so far. Maybe I am better off going behind the grocery store and picking up some empty boxes. At least then I will be sure to be recycling the boxes.

However, I did find some interesting companies that offer a variety of earth friendly packing and shipping materials. First of all I did find one place , ecoproducts.com, that sells what they claim to be eco-friendly boxes and other packing materials. But they didn’t give much information about it.

geami.com offers a packing material made from Kraft paper that is die cut with thousands of slits that expands into hexagonal cells to form a 3-dimensional cushioning material that they consider very earth friendly. For bags and smaller boxes Treecycle has an impressive selection of green paper products.
Uline sells a promising biodegradable packing peanuts made from static free, organic corn starch, it decomposes in water with no toxic waste.

EarthFriendly moving.com has the most comprehensive green moving and packing site that I have seen. They make stackable moving containers from recycled plastic from bleach bottles, household cleaning products, dishwashing and the like. They rent these containers. You can use the special Geamin Packing Paper, Recycled paper sludge cubes for protective fillers that you can just throw in your garden when finished and others. They also use trucks which use bio-diesel fuel as well as several other ways to making moving more earth friendly. Sadly, they are only based in the LA area right now but according to their website they plan to expand nationally in the near future.

They state on their website that “… the world needs to rethink how they pack and move their property. Traditional packing and moving supplies like cardboard boxes, bubble wrap, and Styrofoam peanuts are really bad for our Earth.” And their mission statement says; “To provide America with an earthfriendly packing and moving alternative that will save them time, money and Earth!”

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 10:02 pm and is filed under EcoFriendly, Home and Garden, Made from Recycled Materials, Nature, Recyclable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.