Holiday Tip of the Day: Recycle Mailing Boxes!

With the holiday mailing season on the horizon, give Mother Earth a Christmas gift, too: reuse mailing containers and supplies. Recycling packing materials makes holiday sense—and cents!

As catalog orders are delivered, stockpile mailing boxes and use them for your own gift mailings. Be sure to remove or cover older mailing labels; a permanent black marking pen makes it easy to obliterate shipping bar codes.

At the warehouse store, keep an eye out for sturdy boxes suitable for mailing, and repurpose them after you’ve used them to tote purchases home.

A "peanut" tip: it's easy to recycle styrofoam packing materials if you dump them into a drawstring plastic garbage bag. Close the drawstring for storage. When you're ready to pack your own boxes, snip wedge off a bottom corner of the bag. Pour your peanuts out the hole, then clip the corner closed with a potato chip bag clip. Neat solution!