Recycling is a really terrific pro-environment practice: metals like steel and aluminum, plus glass, plastics, and other wastes, are all recyclable. This is good since the practice saves us a lot in terms of natural resource consumption and the subsequent pollution resulting from manufacturing. Recycling doesn’t eliminate resource consumption or the pollution, but it helps. Recycling is often not the best course of action, though. There’s one better: Reuse.
Reusing Materials
Reusing materials is by far the best possible way to reduce waste and help the environment. If you’re not convinced, just consider these points:
- Reuse eliminates or reduces the need for the middle-man (pick-up, treat, re-distribute) in many cases.
- Reuse means no new raw materials are needed (most recycling offers only a percentage reduction).
- Reuse is the fastest way to return materials to service.
These points also apply to our situation as well.
Our Wastes
We use a fair number of expensive plastic foam boxes, plastic bubble wrap, and ice packs. We use these materials out of necessity, not choice. We simply must protect our biological controls during transit and the packaging materials we use are essential in this regard.
There are alternatives — and we’ve explored them all — but none are satisfactory. There are cardboard insulators, and even though paper in general is a great insulator, we haven’t found anything that would serve as an adequate replacement. We’ve also looked at some new cutting-edge technologies such as inflatable packaging, but we’ve found these products cost-prohibitive. It seems, for now, we’re stuck with foam boxes. They are expensive, too, but they seem to be the least-expensive-yet-effective option.
You Can Help
Every once in a while we will get a call from a customer who asks if they can send the boxes, bubble wrap, and ice packs they’ve accrued over the years back to us. Our answer is always the same: a very emphatic yes!
We can’t offer a monetary incentive for doing so (since, unfortunately, buying new materials is about half the price of paying the freight to get them back), but we will gladly take the materials. When we get them we clean and dry them, then put them back into storage, queued up for their next use. We can offer you our thanks, heart-felt indeed, but this effort is motivated solely by your wanting to do the best you can for the environment. Thus, if you want to send our packaging materials back, you’re invited to do so and feel good that you are indeed helping. If a monetary incentive is absolutely necessary in order for you to act, please know that it does help us keep prices low — for everyone.
Other Options
Sending material back our way isn’t the only way one can reuse our packaging materials. Packing peanuts (we use these too and are reused already, left over from the Univerisity of New Hampshire) and bubble wrap can be taken to your local packing/mailing store. Not all will take these back because they probably have some mindless high-level corporate policy prohibiting this, but it’s worth a try. And as far as ice packs and foam boxes go, you might be able to give them away to employees, your customers, or a local perishables shipper. Our larger foam boxes and ice packs are often put to use as coolers for parties and picnics. Use your imagination.
You might also be able to take these materials to your local recycling center if you have one. It’s not as good as reusing them, but it’s a damn sight better than throwing these expensive materials in a landfill. It’s your choice, and your call, but hopefully, armed with the ideas presented in this article, you’ll do something beneficial.
Resource: Get more excellent facts about recycling from Oberlin College. They offer up this terrific web page of recycling facts. Good stuff.
Apple Maggot Control Bags - GreenMethods.com responds:
Posted: February 15th, 2008 at 3:12 am →
[…] Practical? Well, no less so than the commercial bags, and perhaps even more so. They seem to be considerably faster and easier to use. The claim is for 100% apple maggot control (and only slightly less for other pests), though one orchard who “footied” 4,700 trees claimed they had “essentially no apple maggot damage” (emphasis was added) Read the entire article for more into. It’s a good read. And what a feel good solution if the footies are living a second life. We’re fans of reusing things. […]