SUSTAINABILITY & CIRCULAR ECONOMY
From Shipping Crate to Bird House
How our customers give packaging wood a second life
What do you do with sturdy wooden crates that have fulfilled their purpose as shipping containers? One customer shows how what might seem like waste becomes a home for blue tits, house sparrows and other birds – saving raw materials, CO₂ emissions and disposal costs in the process.
Packaging wood is not a single-use material. The solid spruce boards in our crates are sturdy enough to carry loads across continents – and therefore strong enough to last decades in a garden. One of our customers, a system user of our biobank in northern Germany, recognized exactly that: instead of disposing of their used crates, he repurposed in his own family-workshop into nesting boxes for native songbirds. Many thanks to Gunnar!
“This wood has already been on one journey – now it gets to embark on a second, as a nesting place up in the tree.”
The logic is elegantly simple: a solid spruce nesting box costs between €20 and €40 in shops. The used crates provide the material free of charge and in excellent quality – untreated, splinter-free and weather-resistant. With a jigsaw, some sandpaper and a hole for the entry opening, a high-quality nesting box can be built in around an hour.
At a glance
- 1 crate: yields 5–20 finished nesting boxes
- 0 kg landfill wood: through consistent reuse of packaging materials
- 2nd use instead of disposal: This is how real sustainability is experienced – well beyond the shipping process
The initiative is a reminder that waste reduction is often not about sacrifice, but about imagination. Those who see a crate not as a spent shipping container but as a raw material for the next thing are thinking in cycles – and acting accordingly.
