The future is in boxes

A commodity to keep your eye on is cardboard.

You heard it here first: as cardboard goes, so goes the nation. If the wood-products industry is doing well, that means distributors of other goods - phones, computers, TVs, shoes, underwear, oranges - are shipping a lot of stuff by UPS, which means money is circulating. When more money is moving around, there is more of it available for more people to buy phones, computers, underwear, and oranges - in boxes!

The beauty of this circle of commerce is manifested in our friend, the renewable resource of paper. As everyone knows, the paper in which those value-added products are packaged can be recycled and reconstituted as the next generation of paper products, such as the cardboard boxes going in and out of stores and UPS trucks. In some cases, the package is worth more than the contents.

Again, to belabor the obvious, when shoes and socks and books are boxed and delivered in their cardboard containers, that creates demand for more boxes (as well as for more books and socks) making it more profitable to recycle the box, the Xerox, the envelope, or the newspaper than to throw it away. No demand for new boxes, no incentive to recycle the old one.

Do not throw it away. Do not sentence that shoebox to an eternity in the landfill, where the most it will accomplish in its present karmic incarnation would be to compost down into carbon atoms, perhaps eventually feeding some photosynthesizing weed and recombining with water to form a sugar molecule. Everything gets recycled eventually, but randomness is way too inefficient. That box can contribute more productively to Amerika's economic recovery by transmigrating its cellulose soul into stationery, newsprint, or another box.

What I'm suggesting goes against the core economic wisdom that made Amerika great, but consider the possibility that more new stuff manufactured from more new material isn't the best deal. Consider instead that finding new uses for existing stuff might work better. Don't think outside the box, and don't think inside the box. Think about the box.