Don't Let Amazon Rule Your Trash

Being the 2nd year of the pandemic now we are seeing the world still stuck in the online shopping trend.  We are now forsaking brick-and-mortar stores.  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.  Our garage was stuffed so full with boxes that it no longer worked for cars.  Only tons and tons of trash. 

You may say, why would you be driving anywhere?  Well, we still need to drive to get food and 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.  It was my duty to make sure these were disposed of properly and not just dropped in a landfill like all the other packaging supplies. 

Just throwing these in the trash was not a wise option to get rid of all the packaging supplies So, 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 up to thirty boxes a week. No one could have thought this was a normal thing that would stick around.

This meant that we had to tear them all down and get them into a size that we could fit in the can. 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 simply a few boxes because my hands hurt so bad.  It did make the boxes fit perfectly in the trashcan though.  The search for the best way was still yet to be found.

But luckily I am an avid outdoorsman and went old school with these boxes and used 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. Each week I set out an hour to do the right thing and feel pretty manly doing it.