Our Green Shipping Practices

In celebration of Earth Day we've been writing articles about our green business practices.

From the grocery store to the mailbox.

Clean paperboard boxes like cereal, crackers, or frozen food packaging can be transformed into shipping boxes. Simply turn them inside out and you have a lightweight shipping container that reduces your postage costs and impact on the environment. First, carefully open the glued seam on the box. Some tearing may occur, don't worry you can use tape to seal it later. Reverse the box so the printed side is on the inside.
Re-glue the seam with some paper grade glue. Use binder or paper clips to hold the seam in place as the glue dries. Annie from http://www.anniessweatshop.com/ developed this technique and has used it for over a year. Annie says, "Customers love the creative nature of the box. I love that the box has another adventure before it hits the recycling bin. I've yet to hear about the box breaking in transit."

Trade the plastic for gummed tape.

Try using gummed paper tape (eg. Kraft brand) for sealing your packages. It's totally biodegradable and you're reducing your use of petro based plastics. The gum glue simply needs to be moistened to adhere to a surface. Gummed tape comes in various widths and strengths.

The mailman is your buddy.

Save the time and drive to the post office by shipping from home. You'll need a scale, printer and a PayPal account. You simply weigh your packages, purchase postage through PayPal and print out the labels. See http://www.usps.com/ for more details. According to Annie, "Some bonus features of shipping from home is it makes the accounting easier since it's all in PayPal. Plus, it just seems more efficient if the postal carrier comes to my house everyday anyways."

Take pride in your efforts. Design a label to affix to your packaging that announces your eco practices. For example, Annie like to use, "Annie's Sweatshop reuses packaging creatively."

We hope you will too.