TURTLEBOX: The new, sensible way to move

Posted: 3:46 pm, July 1, 2013 by Jonathan Harding

Moving in Munich? Look no further.

There’s an intrinsic, human pride in packing your worldly belongs and moving house. A regular change of location is almost a prerequisite of the modern person but is the process flawed? Despite currently living at the peak of the technology-era, it seems moving house is still just as difficult as it was 50 years ago. Roles of duck-tape, a haphazard labelling system and the dreaded cardboard box still haunt our every venture. Not for those in Munich though…

The simple design matches the simple idea.

TURTLEBOX are new to the game (April 2013) but their green and sustainable answer to moving inside Germany’s second city is of growing interest. They too dread the cardboard box and its flimsiness but they have proactively sought an alternative, which they now offer as a clean and easy replacement. The green (hence the name) plastic box is, in their words, “simply better. They’re comparable in price, they stand up to use better, they’re bigger, they’re easier to carry (with handles that don’t break) and they come with a dolly to help you move them in stacks.”

Seemingly the perfect answer to moving and all you do is pay a fee for the boxes, they are delivered to your door, you pack and move them and when you have moved in and unpacked, they are collected again. It’s a perfect, short-term medium that may even reduce the amount of clutter that we carry around.

Moving in any city has always been stressful and, speaking from personal experience, Munich is certainly close to top of the list. We’ve all wrestled halfway up the stairs trying to hold both a weeping box and half of its contents. It gets to the point where we all stumble across the thought: There must be a better way of doing this?

The TURTLEBOX design is simple but effective

TURTLEBOX is a simple idea. One we all could have thought of but, fortunately for us, someone else not only had the idea but the drive to put it into place. Their plan extends from practical to heartfelt as they support a local charity (Arche München) too.

It’s clear that their goal is to oust the cardboard box once and for all. This alone should be something we celebrate and it seems the statistics suggest this is a policy worth investing in. Each year 8.4 million people move in Germany, with 112,000 moving within Munich alone. That means that approximately 1.2 million cardboard boxes are used and thrown away in that time. In a world full of waste, we should make use of the practical ideas that do come our way. TURTLEBOX is certainly one of those.