While the Northwest has a reputation for being more eco-minded that most other regions of the country, stats on the area’s near-abusive usage of certain raw materials go almost unnoticed. Like the area’s insatiable appetite for cardboard.

And while the numbers are alarming, very little is being done to broadcast or even quell our voracious burn rate through cardboard boxes. according to Jeff Hill of FrogBox, a company that supplies reusable plastic moving boxes and totes.

Statistics, albeit sparse, show that even in this era of the Hybrid car and endless campaigns to reduce wasted consumption, over 90 percent of the products shipped in, out of and around Washington state (and the rest of the U.S.) are packaged in cardboard boxes, which requires state-sized chunks of forest resources each year to produce, Hill noted.

“There’s a widely-held false perception that since it’s cardboard, it will just be recycled and used again, but cardboard and paper products take up 40 percent of our state’s landfills, and OCC (old corrugated cardboard) is one of the most commonly found items in industrial and residential waste streams,” Hill said.

Hill added that on a city, state and federal level, “very little is being done, and while many politicians claim to be Mother Earth’s best buddy, the initiative going into aggressive programs to educate the masses on cardboard alternatives rarely even makes press briefings.”

The exception to this is the city of San Francisco, Hill said, which recently announcing that its residents now recycle 70 percent of their post-consumer solid waste, reaching the standards of Japan and Belgium. The rest of the U.S. though, including Washington, is still at about 25 percent.

FrogBox, Hill said, is a new breed of company that has found that it is more profitable, convenient and feasible to use something other than cardboard or nothing at all.

“For example,” he said, “consumer products that are being sold without a box or any frivolous packaging are standing out on store shelves and are grabbing customers’ attention, and HDPE (high-density polyethylene) plastic boxes are being rented by local start-up companies as substitutes for people that are moving.”

Estimates show that Greater Seattle uses about 1 million cardboard boxes per month just for moving. And most of those boxes will only ever be used once before they’re discarded or recycled.

“The eco-habits of the Puget Sound have a long way to go before we can brag about our greener choices,” Hill said, “but the tide has turned, and our dependence on cardboard will soon go the way of asbestos insulation and the VHS recorder.”

More information is available at 1-877-FROGBOX (1-877-376-4269).