Eco-friendly options relate to moving, too

As Kyle Truitt was helping his friend, Josh Cox, move last year, the pair grew frustrated at using cardboard boxes to do the packing and moving and wanted to find a less wasteful and more efficient option.

“He and I both try to recycle as much as we can in our own daily lives and leave as little footprint as we can,” Truitt said. “It was one of those things where we thought, ‘There’s got to be an easier way.’ ”

Truitt and Cox found one. They co-founded an Indianapolis-based ecofriendly moving box rental company called Green Box Go. The recyclable industrial-strength plastic totes that measure 27 inches long, 17 inches wide and 12 inches high can be used for more than 100 moves, Truitt said, compared to three or four moves for cardboard boxes. The company cleans the boxes after each use with non-toxic, biodegradable and environmentally safe cleaning products.

More and more moving companies — and their customers — are looking for environmentally friendly options to reduce waste and their environmental footprint.

“Our goal is to eliminate cardboard boxes from the moving experience,” Truitt said. “When you use cardboard boxes, you can’t really use them more than three or four times without the box wearing out or having to re-tape them. Indiana doesn’t really have anything like this, so why not try to put it out there and make Indiana moving just a little bit greener.”

Brendan Malley helped found Big Green Moving LLC in Washington, D.C., more than a decade ago and touts the company as the original “green” mover in the D.C. area. The company utilizes a variety of eco-friendly methods, including carbon offsets, using biodiesel fuel and the use of the reusable plastic totes, which are locally made from recycled materials.

“We found a local manufacturer from Winchester, Va., and picked a color — black — that allows them to use a recycled resin, as opposed to buying them off a shelf and having them shipped from overseas, where you have unknown manufacturing practices and likely unknown source of materials,” Malley said.

“You use half of the internal packing (compared to cardboard) because the boxes are sturdier and there’s no tape, so from that standpoint, it does more than just replace the disposable box. It reduces the amount of wrapping material in the contents and eliminates tape. You’re talking a 60- to 70-percent reduction in the total waste of material that would flow downstream. So, it’s a really good solution.”

Malley situated his company in the heart of Washington, so it’s more centrally located in an effort to reduce the amount of miles spent on the road.

“The further away your mover is, the more energy intensive it is for them to get there and back as opposed to a more centrally located mover,” Malley said. “That mover is more available to its own workforce in terms of getting to and from work by public transportation or by bike. We’re in a unique situation, being in D.C. About 40 percent of our workforce rides their bikes to work. On a given day, if we have 12 guys going out on trucks, we might only have two or three cars parked at our facility. It’s maybe the least boldfaced green strategy out there, but it’s probably — by order of magnitude — the most consequential. You can reduce the mileage of a moving van from 50 miles a day to 20 a day. There are very few green strategies that can save you 60 percent off your environmental impact.”

Malley admits that each moving situation is different and there is no onesize-fits-all solution for a green move, but as long as companies are thinking about their options, they’re likely on the right track to meeting the consumer demand for alternative solutions.

“In the early days, we’d spend a lot of time answering questions about what could a green mover be,” Malley said. “Whereas, now, customers have shifted from wondering about it to almost expecting the mover to have those strategies in hand.”