This year has been really hard on much of the world.  In fact, the United States has had incredible unemployment and the cost of living has simply gone up.  There are fewer options available and the ability to shop at brick and mortar stores has been drastically limited.  This has led to a change in the way we shop in general.  Our economy has moved from a just in time brick and mortar delivery to eCommerce.  It is really incredible to see this happening and now I am personally seeing consequences that I never thought would happen.  I simply found that my garage was getting filled with boxes.  It started to drive me crazy and my wife was going nuts because we couldn’t even park our car in the garage anymore.

Honestly, we didn’t drive much of anywhere but still, winter is almost here and we needed to clean out the garage of all these eCommerce boxes. The thought was that we should make sure to get rid of them the proper way. I didn’t want to do anything but recycle all of these boxes.  I saw that I was creating up to 10 times more trash than normal per week and that was driving me nuts.  I knew that there had to get disposed of properly and not just dropped in a landfill like all the other packaging supplies.

So instead of trashing all these packaging supplies, I decided to make sure we recycled them properly. For our home, this meant that we were able to use one trashcan in green each week.  That is not a whole lot of space.  But it is the only amount that our local trash company allows and we knew that it was the correct thing to do.  We at first just threw the boxes in but after 3 no more would ever fit.  This was a problem because we ended up using 15 to 20 boxes a week.  I never imaged we would ever have too many, but these wouldn’t fit in the trashcan.  

What we decided to do was to break down the boxes in order to fit them in.  This seems so easy, but I was using my hands and it simply was too much work.  My hands were getting these huge paper cuts and still I didn’t get many boxes in the trashcan.  So I decided to break out the scissors because that makes the most sense.  Well, it turns out that the task was not going to work.  I had to stop after 2 boxes because my hands hurt so bad.  It did make the boxes fit perfectly in the trashcan though.  So another way had to be found.

I decided to go old school with these boxes and use a big knife.  Well, the knife was not big, but it was a fixed bladed knife with a nice comfortable handle.  I knew that if it was a thin knife it wouldn’t be comfortable either.  So I decided to slowly and safely cut the boxes into the correct shapes to fit the trashcan perfectly.  It was a great idea and it even worked.  I was able to cut them all down and fit them in each week.  It takes about 30 minutes a week to do it right and safely. So I hope this helps you.