Who would have thought house moving can be as stressful on trees and landfills as it is on the old marriage?
Massive cardboard boxes piled high in a moving truck. Think about it. We assemble them, fill them with our precious books, clothes and snow globe collections, only to toss them once we are unpacked and busy feathering our new nests. It amounts to heavy poundage of cardboard and trash in the landfill.
All of this led Southern California product designer Spencer Brown to form his award-winning company, Earth Friendly Moving. It challenges our wasteful moving methods with the country’s first, zero-waste packing and moving system developed from recyclable trash mined from local landfills.
Hard-to-recycle, colored plastic bleach bottles from your laundry room and other unwanted containers from garage shelves are reborn as reusable moving crates that can endure 500 moves.
His system is called RecoPack┞¢ (Recycled Ecological Packing Solution) and involves both delivery and pick up of lightweight, stackable containers that consumers rent for one-dollar a box a week. How brilliant is that? Brilliant enough to just be named winner of the Governor’s Environmental Leadership Award, the highest environmental honor in California.
Brown figures for every 100 containers rented he is removing 500 pounds of trash from landfills.
“Hey, we’re detoxing the landfills and spreading the green love,” Brown gushed to me. “We’re a functioning and profitable green enterprise and fast becoming one of the top green businesses in the world. I think it’s because using an alternative makes people feel good.”
That’s quite an achivement in just a couple of years. It just goes to show how a great green idea can reinvent the wheel.
“I set out to make a recycled moving box and created a national media sensation,” Brown says. “When the life span of the containers are over, we just grind them up and make new ones.”
In addition to the containers, Brown makes green packing materials that include Geami Packing Paper (produced on sight) and RecoCubes, a compostable aternative to packing peanuts made from recycled paper sludge. He even developed the Poopy Pallet, a plastic pallet made from recycled baby diapers used to hold your unpacked containers as they await pick up.
The containers come in five different sixzes and can be combined to suit your needs (small crates for CDs, large ones for your Ugly Dolls). You place an order by calling the company’s office, located in Costa Mesa, Ca.1-888-900-PACK (7225). The voicemail gives you options, including eco-packing tips.
If all of this isn’t commitment enough, Brown’s company transports the Recopacks on veggie powered delivery trucks boasting engines that spin a large alternator to make electricity. The electricity is converted into A/C power which is the source for powering the Geami Roll machine for making the wrapping paper on sight.
Until now, this anti-cardboard enterprise has been limited to Southern Cal, but this year, Earth Friendly Moving plans to go nationwide. This month, it will launch its Sacramento business, counting the California government as one of its new clients.