A new report compares the environmental impact of shipping things in different packaging styles. Turns out that overall weight and volume are generally more important considerations than material choice. The overall winner seems to be lightweight bag, if it’ll hold your stuff.

We’ve been trying to figure out how to ship our WideLoaders for years. Their odd shape makes for a real head scratcher. We’ve tried re-using old boxes, cutting them up to size and wrapping the whole WideLoader with cardboard. That ends up doubling (at least) the weight and taking a lot of time to do all the cutting and taping. We currently buy rolls of corrugated wrap and they still take a bunch of tape, though are fairly lightweight because the corrugated stuff is only faced on one side. I can’t tell you how lame it feels to buy cardboard and have it shipped to our office at the same time that we’re recycling other cardboard out the other end.

With this report in hand, it might be time to investigate the Tyvek sleeve option we tossed around a couple months ago. What if you could re-use it for something?

One of the reasons we chose the paperboard Soft Spot for our CD Where the Rubber Meets the Road is because you can ship it without any additional packaging at all. I just throw a stamp and a label right on the CD wrapper and drop it in the mail. Major postage savings, too. FYI, I since have found some other companies making CD packaging that I believe to be environmentally superior because of their commitment to using greener paper stock than Oasis does. One such is Stumptown Printers, but as the new report shows, it seems more important that you choose (in this instance) a paper-based, mailable CD case than that the paper be green. Of course, do both if possible!

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 24th, 2006 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Enviro, Green Business, Music, Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.