Catalog and online buyers collect lots and lots of boxes and packaging. Just take a look at the “box closet” at our house; we seem to collect Amazon boxes as fast as we collect coat hangers!

So what do you do with them? Flatten them and put them in the recycling bin most likely.

Columbia Sportswear is trying a new twist on the theme: A Box Life. Online customers can choose to receive their purchases in used boxes. Then they can use the QR code on the box to track where the carton has been.

(Read the article)

Add your comment to this post »»

The Pacific Northwest is one of the richest sources of fiber – including wood fiber – in North America. As a result, I’m always looking for new and creative ways that paper and pulp are being used.

Unfolded-Paper in Design, Art, Architecture and Industry, by Petra Schmidt and Nicola Stattmann (Birkhäuser 2009), is an amazing book showing how far we can go with cellulose.

(Read the article)

Add your comment to this post »»

.
The publishers of the 119-year old weekly newspaper, The Budget, almost caused a riot – or at least a strike – when they proposed to move the paper from print to online in 2006.

Earlier this year the publisher reconsidered the plan to go online.

What WERE they thinking?

The newspaper, a main means of communication for the dispersed Amish community – about 227,000 members nation wide – is targeted to an audience whose religion expects them to shun telephones, automobiles, and electricity. Nearly 20,000 subscribers across the US and Canada pay $42 a year for a subscription and the subscriber base is stable.

If you think mainstream media is suffering from loss of readership, just think what the result would have been if The Budget had dropped the printed version and gone completely online!

Didn’t anyone think about their audience?

Read the rest of the story here.

Add your comment to this post »»