Conserving Cartons

I’ve written before about how the egg carton is to me one of the greatest ideas ever. Eggs are real fragile and as a container the egg carton is a perfectly engineered for the task of protecting eggs in transit and in storage.

Sadly, most egg cartons are used only once and then are thrown away, or recycled. Some people save them up for people with chickens and I used to gladly accept such donations, but then I realized I’d be better off not using cartons from other commercial brands. My eggs needed their own brand and identity. A while back I started buying blank egg cartons and I made a label and an insert which I paste on the outer and inner carton. The outer label simply describes the eggs and the brand and the inner label tells about the eggs, the chickens, our agricultural philosophy and the other products we have.

My egg customers are real good about returning the used cartons to me for reuse. I estimate I reuse them at least ten times before they get recycled. Sometimes the whole carton it trashed by then, sometimes only the labels need to be replaced. Every time I reuse a carton it ends up costing me less. A single use carton would cost me 50 cents and if I reuse that carton ten times it brings my packaging cost down to 5 cents per dozen. This fits in perfectly with out marketing and agricultural philosophy.