Recycling is a great way to stretch the Earth’s resources. Here at NRS we recycle everything we can – office paper, soda cans, plastic wrap film, and scraps of aluminum from our Frameshop,  to name a few. Coffee grounds and veggie scraps go into Retail Sales Manager Laura’s worm bin (one of my favorite things to tell visitors is, “Laura’s got worms.”). And we bale and recycle all our excess cardboard.

But our favorite thing to do with cardboard boxes is to reuse them, to send them back out to customers loaded with products they’ve ordered. A box that earns the right to avoid the recycling bin carries the noble title of NRS Ugly Box and gets a nice green Ugly Box sticker to prove it. Some 15,000 boxes earn the title each year.

To make the reuse cut, a box must first of all be sturdy enough to carry its contents safely to the customer. It can’t have too many stickers and labels on it that might confuse the shipping company. And certain size boxes lend themselves best to our packing methods.

So, when you receive an order in a box with one of these beautiful green stickers, know that it’s contributed in a small way to conserving our resources and protecting the outdoors that we all enjoy. Please consider finding your own way of reusing it. You can pack away the boating gear in it at the end of the season. Make it into a bed for the new puppy. Use it to lug stuff to Salvation Army.

Or, at the very least, please recycle it. Cardboard is one of the most readily recyclable things we routinely handle. It’s the right thing to do.

Happy Earth Day!