What do you do when you are getting ready to move into a new place? Do you call up your local truck rental company to inquire how much its cardboard boxes cost, only to feel a surge of guilt because you know it just isn’t very green, but think it’s a necessary evil? Well, Rent-a-Green Box in Costa Mesa, CA, is the first company in America that is addressing this very issue — coming up with a greener way to move that doesn’t involve cardboard or any petroleum-based products. Rent-a-Green Box, serving private residences and businesses, calls itself the first zero-waste pack-and-move company in the country, and claims to save the consumer 50% on cost and 20 hours on time involved as compared to traditional moving methods. Not only are the products green, but they are also unique and fun to use. Here’s why: All of the packing and moving products are made from 100% recycled post-consumer end-of-life trash rescued from landfills, such as plastic bottles, aluminum cans, cardboard food packaging and newspaper sludge. Considering that 20% of Americans move each year, resulting in more trash in our landfills and wasted resources, this may be the beginning of a whole new industry and era for the green movement. The company’s products include some of the most ingenious ways to recycle what most people consider useless waste. For example, Rent-a-Green-Box mined hundreds of baby diapers (which will never break down) from the landfill and molded the material with black recycled plastic to create what the company calls a Poopy Pallet — instead of chopping down trees to make wooden ones. (Also, Rent-a-Green-Box alleges that the pallets do not stink!) Other exciting products include:

• The Recopack, which is a lidded, stackable crate made from 100% recycled plastic trash from landfills that is secured with a Reco zip made from recycled plastic bottle caps, nixing the need for cardboard boxes and packing tape.
• Expandos, the alternative to packing peanuts, are made from recycled cardboard food packaging and will hold your valuables in place. The company once sent a dozen eggs to a TV show across the country in New York City and they arrived in pristine condition!
• The Reco-Dolly is comprised of 100% recycled aluminum cans, and is easy to maneuver.

Rent-a-Green-Box’s truck fleet, which runs on waste vegetable oil, delivers Recopacks directly to the customer’s door, and then picks them up afterward. More than 500 pounds of plastic trash are removed from landfills for every 100 Recopacks used, which keeps more than 350 pounds of trash away from landfills, saves more than 300 gallons of drinkable water from the manufacturing process, saves more than 50 gallons of foreign oil and eliminates more than 2,500 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. This is exciting news, because it is now possible for moving to be more earth friendly. It’s already been proven, and as more companies innovate we can expect to see many more creative solutions to packing and moving, which, until now, were completely wasteful. Rent-a-Green Box currently services Orange and Los Angeles counties as well as parts of the Inland Empire and San Diego County, all in Southern California, and is planning to expand nationwide.