Cardboard is cheap right up until you use it.
A two-bedroom move takes about sixty cardboard boxes, or forty-four of our totes, which are bigger. Same move, both ways, honestly priced.
Cardboard
- 60 boxes, mixed sizes
- $168
- Six rolls of tape and a gun
- $46
- Hand truck rental for the weekend
- $40
- Folding and taping
- ~3 hours
- Breaking down after
- ~2 hours
- January slush on the driveway
- soaks through
- Left in the garage
- a pile
Our bins
- 44 totes at the 40+ tier, two weeks
- $286
- Dolly, labels, zip ties
- included
- Tape
- none, lids latch
- Assembly
- none
- Delivery and pickup
- free
- January slush on the driveway
- shrugs it off
- Left in the garage
- nothing
A box you use once versus one we use four hundred times.
Cardboard is not the villain here. Corrugated is one of the most recycled materials in the country, and most boxes are already made from old boxes. But recycling is not free. Every cycle means a truck, a mill, water and heat, and the fibre gets shorter each time until it cannot be a box any more.
Reuse skips all of that. Our totes run several hundred moves before they crack, and when one finally does it goes back into the plastic stream instead of the curb.
| Cardboard | Our totes |
|---|---|
1–2 moves before the corners give out |
~400 moves before we retire one |
60 boxes to the curb after one move |
0 we take every one of them back |
Tote life is our own figure from the fleet we run, not an industry standard. How many times a cardboard box survives depends a lot on how carefully it comes apart.