Here at Kismet Mosaic, we strive to reuse or recycle everything that comes into the store. Our Kismet tile line of recycled glass tiles encouraged us to be as "green" in our business practices as our tiles are in their manufacture.
Cardboard—boxes mostly—either goes into our recycling bin or to a local recycling company (Urban Recycling). They may also be cut down and used in order packaging or in-house projects.
Bubble Wrap—each of our supply order boxes comes with 3 pieces of bubble wrap. We re-use that for packing outgoing orders. When we get 2-3 boxes per order and up to 4 supply orders in a month it start to add up.
Plastic Bags—most of our tile comes to us in resealable plastic bags. We save it all us and take it to local grocery stores that collect it for use by Trex in making their products.
"Cradle to Cradle" products—I strive to source as much of my packaging materials locally. I recently found a Cradle to Cradle labelled kraft paper mailer. If you haven't heard of the Cradle to Cradle production efforts, it's pretty interesting.
Packing “peanuts” and other items—Kismet also takes in and reuses packing materials from local residents (i.e. my house, my assistant's houses, my friend Sam brings in stuff, and so on.)
Label backings and other business waste—these papers are not recyclable, so we use them in outgoing order packaging. This helps to keep our production waste to a minimum.
We do buy new resealable bags from a local packaging company for breaking down the tile from the kilograms we purchase it in to the ounces we sell it by. These we reuse as needed. I’ve priced bio-plastic bags but didn’t find them to be at a price point I was willing to pass on to customers as “cost of goods sold” costs. Hopefully these costs will come down, but in the meantime, you can look into Trex recycling efforts and see if there’s a store in your area that collects for them.