In this digital world of shopping, we spend less on time and transportation and get practically everything delivered to us. That generates a lot of cardboard boxes received at our house. We could recycle them, and recycling cardboard is probably a sound practice (unlike maybe plastic), but that would require a lot of energy to melt down the old boxes, just so they can be reconstituted as new boxes made out of recycled material. So I break down all the shipping boxes, and stash them in the back of the Mazda.
Any time I’m already in town and pass by the local Mailbox Depot store, I stop and carry all the boxes in. The mailbox store adds them to their inventory and reuses them. Dropping them off doesn’t really require any extra resources on our part except a little time. All the packing material we receive goes in a plastic trash sack and gets dropped off as well.
The mailbox store provides these “re-used” boxes and packing material, at no charge, to their patrons who could use a little extra help when they ship something; the store will pack it up for free. Recycling is better than the landfill, re-using takes less energy than recycling, and the shop does a good deed as well. Hats off to them; Mailbox Depot. Brilliant!