Our impact
A typical two-bedroom move burns through about 60 cardboard boxes. Most of them get used once and end up on the curb for bulk trash. We built Bin & Back to make the cardboard-free move the easy move, not the expensive one.
Calculator
Pick your home size. We'll show you what buying new boxes would use up, and what renting bins avoids.
That's a stack of flattened cardboard about as tall as you are, kept off a Houston curb.
How we calculate: one bin replaces about 1.5 cardboard boxes. A new moving box weighs about 2.2 lb. Making a ton of corrugated cardboard uses roughly 17 trees' worth of fiber and about 7,000 gallons of water, and making plus landfilling it releases roughly a ton of COâ‚‚-equivalent (EPA WARM model and industry averages, rounded down). One roll of packing tape seals about 15 boxes. We assume new boxes; if you'd have found free ones, your savings are smaller, but your roach risk is bigger.
Why it matters here
Houston's residential recycling rate has hovered in the low teens for years, and moving boxes are the worst case: too many to fit the green bin, so they go out for heavy trash or into the apartment compactor. Wet cardboard, which is most cardboard after a Gulf Coast afternoon, can't be recycled at all.
Our bins are heavy-duty polypropylene built to be dropped, stacked and washed for years. Each one replaces a fresh set of cardboard boxes every single rental. Across a year, one bin keeps roughly 60 boxes from ever being made.
Uniform bins stack four high on a dolly and pack a truck tighter than mixed boxes, which for a lot of moves means one trip instead of two. Fewer trips is fewer miles on 610.
What we actually do
The running tally
We're counting from our very first rental. Book yours and watch the number move.
Clean, dry cardboard is. Moving boxes usually aren't clean or dry by the end of a Houston move, and most people have far more than the recycling bin holds, so they go out with heavy trash. Even when it is recycled, making the box in the first place still used the trees, the water and the energy. Not making it beats recycling it.
A single-use plastic bin would be. Ours are used dozens of times. Spread over its life, one bin's plastic footprint per move is a tiny fraction of the cardboard it replaces. When a bin finally retires it's recycled or rehomed, not landfilled.
Yes. Property managers get a resident code and a "cardboard-free community" mention. Employers get a relocation code and impact reporting for their sustainability goals. Email partners@binandbackhouston.com.
Ready to skip the cardboard?
Free delivery and pickup within 30 miles of downtown. Two dollies with every order. One week or two. No cardboard, no tape, no trash pile on the curb.