Recycling your shipping items is worth it

Now that I am a little older I find myself doing some things differently. I care about what I leave behind for my family.  Living in 2021 I know that eCommerce is king and that most of us get a ton of boxes in the mail every week. 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 homes and soon their trash.  If you are getting twenty boxes a week in the mail and not recycling then it really seems harmful to the world.  I know for me I am working on recycling the right way and also trying to cut back on the total waste used by my family.    

Depending on where you live I understand recycling can be pretty annoying.  It certainly is for me!  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.  This meant I needed to find an easy way to get all the stuff in my bin in order to do the right thing.

Geometry seemed to be the answer to this.  I found out that I would simply have to cut the stuff into the best shape to fit the can. 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.  This left a lot to be desired because it didn’t fill the can to its actual capacity.  It was wasting space.

Scissors seemed to be a good answer to my problem so I gave that a try.  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.  What actually worked was going old school.  I pulled out a knife and went to town.

My old fishing knife was working really well and it was a nice expensive knife.  It has great 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.  No blisters and clean recycling made me happy.

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