A Reddit user found themselves an unsuspecting, and possibly unintended, victim of a prank by their son's friend, and they were clearly not amused when 1,000 boxes showed up at their house.
The Redditor posted a picture of the boxes, stacked and wrapped in plastic, to a subreddit called r/Anticonsumption.
The photo is captioned, "My son's friend thought it would be funny to send 1,000 USPS flat rate boxes to my house. Should I return the favor to his parent?"
While this may have been meant as nothing more than an innocent prank, the son's friend may not have thought about the larger implications. For one, the 15 to 20 bundles of boxes are all wrapped in plastic packaging, which can take hundreds if not thousands of years to decompose.
Then there's the wasted resources to consider if these boxes don't go on to be used. Cardboard boxes are made out of wood pulp. It takes a substantial amount of water and energy to convert that wood pulp into the finished product, on top of the fact that trees are cut down to supply that wood pulp.
In 2021, the U.S. shipped roughly 416 billion square feet of cardboard packaging.
If cardboard isn't recycled properly and ends up in a landfill, the pollution is only compounded by the methane released as the cardboard decomposes. Methane is one of the most potent pollutants that can be released into the atmosphere.
Fortunately, there's a simple solution that could keep these boxes from going to waste.
One commenter said, "If this happens, you drop them off at the local post office and they put them back in the back room. They still get used. Worst thing that happens is that gas was used to carry them to the house from the local post office sorting place (where they are normally stored) and back."
Another commenter shared the same basic thought, but with an important distinction, stating, "I've got better things to do than tote these boxes off [to] the post office - I'd call the student and his mom and make them do it!"
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