If you are living in this century and the year is 2020 or greater then you are probably living in a box world. If you don’t know what I mean then you may have not lived through the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic. This has led to an entire change in lifestyles and how people get and receive goods. The fact of the matter is that eCommerce and having items shipped directly to your home is the way things are happening for a near majority of all shopping due to the pandemic and regulations restricting shopping in person. This has led to millions of boxes being produced shipped and finding their way to people’s home and soon their trash. I implore you to change the way you are getting rid of those 5, 10, 50 boxes a week and not to just throw them into the trash. I want you to recycle them properly so they don’t go to waste and the cost of shipping does not go up for all.
This is not the easiest thing to do and I know because in my neighborhood and with my city recycling is hard. I only have one trashcan a week to use for recycling and it is not big and my boxes will not all just be able to be tossed in. Instead of having a great system, my garage was filled up with boxes for months until I figured out a reasonable way to recycle properly. I was not able to just drive and drop them off at a recycling factory like I used to. So many things became illegal and nonessential overnight that it was hard to see that become one of them. So I had to find a way to get all of these packaging supplies into my recycling bin safely and easily.
What I found is that the only way to get all of the packaging supplies into the single trashcan was to cut them up and put them in by perfect shape. This sounds super simple and really easy, but in fact it was really not. I ended up getting blisters to start and tons of paper cuts. This was because first I just tossed the boxes in and saw they didn’t really fit. I tried to crush them down but then the trash people would not shake the can or help get the boxes out. Now I was stuck with a half-full recycling can after the trashmen had come. This was disappointing and I had to find a better way.
So I then went to get some scissors after I tried tearing the boxes. I had to get scissors because my hands got these huge cardboard paper cuts and it was simply not worth it. I then tried to scissor the boxes into the right shape and for a bit it worked great. Then after a few boxes my hands got red hot spots and blisters started to form. This was not fun, not sustainable and I had to find a better way. Finally, I found a big fishing knife and it worked really well.
This knife was a fixed blade knife that had a good steel on it. Cardboard is actually really hard on knife steel and dulls it quickly so you may need a good sharpener to go along with your knife. But this was easy to use and didn’t cause my hand to get blisters. I cut the boxes safely into small pieces and put them in the can allowing it to be filled to capacity.
