Now this is what we call green innovation.
Picture this: You receive your gadget in an ordinary looking cardboard box, made of recycled paper. You take out your stuff and tear up this cardboard into 100 pieces and bury each to have 100 different trees. Magically, this ordinary brown cardboard gives rise to life, and is aptly called the ‘Life Box’.
And no, it is not the recycled paper, but the 100 or so tree seeds that its insides are laced with, that grow into 100 planet-savers. Each of these is dusted with mycorrhizal fungal spores which nurture the seeds while your gadget ships, and then help them sprout when planted. Now, what better way to undo the damage that creating your gadget might have caused, and further reverse the damage we have already done.
Sounds good, but these boxes are expensive as of now. You can order upto 100 for your company, or get a single box at an exorbitant $30-$50. But this is because these boxes are produced on a small scale right now. With the backing of big companies, and funding by governments, there is no doubt that the price of these boxes will fall steeply. Estimates say that even a 1-2% share of Life Box in the cardboard box market of US could cover 25,000 acres of land per week. It seems like we might be just in time to save our only habitat.
In a similar initiative, we provided seeds with our June issue of Digit. Maybe, one day you will take out your copy of Digit, and the cardboard behind it can be planted to grow the ‘trees of the month’. We are smiling wide at the prospects.