The Low Down On Green Living
June 12th, 2008
Planning an Eco-Friendly Move
Stumble it!
It’s summer and that means a lot of folks are getting ready to move. Typically moving is a major environmental hazard zone: wasted packing paper, discarded boxes and thousands of miles of smog-belching truck driving. The average American move uses 100-120 pounds of cardboard and emits 5,000 pounds of carbon dioxide for a cross-country move or 500 pounds for an intra-state move. Yee-ouch!
We’ll help you make your move more eco-friendly. Here are some tips on Lower Impact Moving:
1. First of all, don’t move what you don’t need! Go through your closets and boxes and get rid of the books, clothing and knick-knacks you won’t be using at your new home. You can give things to your local Goodwill or sell them on Craigslist. You’ll cut the carbon footprint of your move by limiting your junk!
2. A couple of months before your move, start saving your newspapers. You can use these for packing paper and then recycle it after your move.
3. We really encourage you to not use styrofoam “peanuts.” But if you do, please do check to see if you can recycle them. Many cities now recycle styrofoam– click here to check for your city.
4. You can go to your local grocery store or electronics store and ask them for their discarded boxes– this will save you hundreds of dollars and will conserve precious paper resources. Then you can recycle the boxes when you’re done.
5. Or if want clean, great quality boxes, you can go to our friends at UsedCardboardBoxes.com. You simply go to their site, order the quantity of boxes you want, and they send them to you. All of the boxes are recycled and can be recycled again. We have used this service and can give it a personal testimonial!
6. You’ll probably do some house-cleaning either when you move out of your old place or into your new place. Be sure to use non-toxic cleaning products, or if you want someone to do the cleaning for you, click here to find a green home-cleaning service in your area.
If you’re lucky enough to live in Southern California, you have another couple of great options for green moving services. Go Green Moving, based in Irvine, will move you using their biodiesel powered trucks. Another great company, MoveGreen, based in Santa Barbara, also uses biodiesel trucks, recycled moving supplies and plants 10 trees for every move!
We really hope some of the big national moving companies will investigate using biodiesel or other lower-impact moving options. (hint, hint, nudge, nudge.)
Do you have any other good ideas for green moves? Please share them in the comments section.
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Comments
Get Your Eco-Friday Scoop | GlamSpirit
June 13th, 2008 at 7:07 am
[...] this summer? Check out 6 Smart and Eco-Friendly Moving Tips from Low Impact [...]
Jennae @ Green Your Decor
June 13th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Getting boxes from grocery stores is a great, easy tip. I don’t think we have ever purchased a box during any of our several moves in the last couple of years. The boxes are otherwise crushed and discarded by most of the stores, so it’s a great way to rescue them from the waste stream and put them to good use.
Nancy
June 13th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Consider purchasing new (to you) furniture at your destination rather than paying to move furniture that may not be the right fit for your new home.
Look for used pieces and have them recovered in eco-friendly fabrics.
Take this chance to really clean out the past, the stuff you have been hanging on to. We have freecycle in our community to post free articles that you want someone to pick up at no cost.
frank
June 14th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Here’s a company that basically rents out plastic moving boxes:
http://www.earthfriendlymoving.com/
EcoChick
July 14th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Wow, what an awesome blog. One thing your missing though is an inventory list. I found that on another website and it really helped. i mean the first time i moved, all of my boxes just said “Hailey’s stuff” and if I really needed to know what it was, the box said “Really important Hailey’s stuff”. Needless to say my unpacking sucked. One thing you don’t mention though is how freaking espenive boxes are. Seriously I moved a 1 bedroom aparment and I spent more on the boxes than anything else.
Now that I am a few years older I am doing things right. I am first of all giving myself plenty of time so I dont throw everything in to a large box (only to have it bottom out later) and I am having a garage sale to make some money and eleminate excess stuff. One other really smart thing I did was go looking for cheaper boxes. Gas is so expensive that I didnt want to drive around, and besides that do you even know what its like to dumpster dive? It aint pretty my friend.
Anyways I found this blog, and decided to try that usedcardboardboxes.com. They delivered my boxes for free!!! Free people!!! I like free. And the boxes were so much freaking cheaper than the boxes from the storage it’s rediculous. The boxes were also in great condition so they stacked well. I also found a code that gave me a 5% discount. The word is TREES and it goes in this little box code area on the page. That really helped out. Well, back to packing and thanks for the awesome tips!!
Hailey Bo Bailey
spencer Brown
July 27th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Hi,
I still can’t figure out having UPS or whatever carrier air freight, distribute, transport, and then finally deliver used boxes as very “earth friendly”, in terms of the amount of foreign oil consumed, CO2 created and waste entering our landfills; just to deliver used cardboard boxes direct to a customer’s door. Although reusing used cardboard was a good idea when fuel was super cheap- like under a buck a gallon and easy to get, the method of delivery is really based on an old school industry and mentality… Hey let’s burn up a ton of foreign oil to deliver these used boxes that will end up in a landfill, as the cost to recycle them with the price per gallon of fuel near $5.00 is just not practical.
So the real pitch here is buy a used cardboard box, waste time messing with fussy tape to build the box, waste a bunch a fuel transporting it around, release a ton of C02 emissions into the atmosphere and pack our landfills with a bunch of trash. This is the reality when you buy a new, used or recycled cardboard box.
We have a real simple idea and we think our idea makes more sense. Let’s take tons of our hard to recycle plastic trash that will never breakdown in our landfills (detox 4 landfills), make really cool lime green boxes that can be used over 400 round trip times at the fraction of the energy used to make a disposable box ( and when they are expired- we grind them up to make another Recopack- zero waste and cradle to cradle!) and then deliver them on waste veggie oil and algae based bio-fuels.
We help you figure out exactly what you need for free, so no extra trips to the store, no messy tape, no building boxes…. Just open the Recopack and start packing. It’s moving made easy! When you’re done, call us and we’ll come by and pick them up!
Check out the new video airing on the fine living network and see for yourself that saving 5% is not really saving - but costing all of us in the long term:
It’s Easy Being Green:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=y-g8DYsVyu8
Leah Ingram
January 25th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
I got and gave away my moving boxes and bubble wrap via Freecycle when we moved two years ago. If I were moving again (and I hope to heck that doesn’t happen again soon), I would turn to Freecycle first so I could take advantage of reused moving supplies that I could get for free. However, I do like this idea of reusable plastic moving bins made from recycled plastic: http://suddenlyfrugal.wordpress.com/2009/01/25/moving-without-the-boxes/
Leah
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