Columbia Sportswear Company (USA), mostly focusing on outdoor sports, came up with a great ecological idea to transfer their lifestyle concept of “Reduce, Re-use and Recycle” to their customers. The so called “A Box Life” project was brought to life by the simple idea of re-using cardboard boxes to reduce costs and avoid thousands of boxes being thrown away every day. 
Cardboard boxes sometimes travel a long way around the world. That’s why Columbia came up with the idea to bring a special feature: A tracking service by QR codes. All boxes have “A Box Life”-sticker with a QR-code on it. 
Scanning this QR code with a mobile phone leads to a mobile side where users can not only track where their box is traveling right now, but also where the box was first send from and which rout it came till it arrived at your doorsteps. 
As a social component users can also can also submit location based messages on the mobile site to share and interact with other people who used the same box.
The life of a box can also be tracked and seen on the PC website, where the 5 most traveled boxes can be seen on a google map, in addition with the number of participants, miles traveled and therefore “saved” boxes. 
Soon users will be able to submit pictures of themselves with the boxes and build something like “social travel books” of these boxes.
All in all a very innovative and ecologic project from Colombia. It would be great to extend this (till now) US-only project worldwide. We think that this kind of project could be a great PR success in many countries, especially in the ECO-trendy Japan. Even when u think about the fact that the right packaging is sometimes much more important to Japanese than the real content, this kind of project could promise great success in the economically struggling Japan and even create a new trend of package conscientiousness and ECO-lifestyle.
