04/ 02/ 2008
by Sandy Siegel
After spending hundreds of dollars on disposable packing materials to move his home office, product designer Spencer Brown started thinking outside the box. The cardboard box, that is. The result? Rent A Green Box.
Brown's "aha" moment came in the Southern California landfill where he went to unload the cartons from his move. Noticing a large bin of plastic bottles that once held all sorts of household products, he got the notion of making a moving box from recycled plastic. Months of research followed. "I researched the industry and realized that packing and moving hadn't changed in 230 years," he says. "It started with a wooden crate and it progressed to the cardboard box, but then it stopped."
That's why, in 2006, Brown introduced the RecoPack (Recycled Ecological Packing Solution) container, a sturdy, reusable lime-green moving and storage box made from recycled plastic.
"We deliver environmental consciousness in a box," says Brown, who rents the RecoPack in three sizes for a dollar apiece per week. When customers are finished packing, they load them onto one of Rent A Green Box's Poopy Pallets, each of which is made of more than 500 recycled--and thoroughly cleaned--baby diapers.
Even Rent A Green Box's trucks are earth friendly, using vegetable oil instead of gas or diesel for fuel. Rent A Green Box also sells dozens of earth-friendly moving products, including a Bubble Wrap substitute made from recycled cardboard sludge and biodegradable packing cubes that act as fertilizer after the move.
This year, Brown is going green beyond his Orange County, Calif., base by hooking up with operating partners in several states who will tap into their local landfills for recyclable plastic.
"For every 100 boxes we rent," he says, "we take 500 pounds of trash out of the landfills ... and we prevent 350 pounds of cardboard, Bubble Wrap, tissue and waste from entering the landfills."
On top of that, Brown plants a tree for each customer who rents 100 boxes or more. "We need to give back," says Brown, whose goal is to plant 1 million trees. "Giving back is a way of demonstrating that we're committed to our mission statement."
This article is from the April/May 2008 issue of MyBusiness.
