How Do You Like Them Apples?

Another Earth Day came and went this year and one thing stayed the same: Most Americans still aren’t overly worried about climate change.

Just 37 percent say they worry a great deal about it—a fraction that's barely budged from the 35 percent who said so nearly two decades ago, according to Gallup Inc.'s annual environmental poll.

That got me worried. Then my worry turned to guilt. And that guilt, as guilt often does, turned to a real hankering for some pizza.

Later, a takeout pizza, much to my relief, didn't turn into anything other than a tasty meal.

As for the cardboard box it came in, that's another story. It turned into a real eye-opener.

See, the pizza box was one of the best examples I'd seen in a long time of the neglected second of the three R's—you know, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

On the outside, the box was plain cardboard brown. Inside, it was a riot of color. It seemed fishy, though fruity was more like it. Here and there, I could make out an off-register picture of an apple.

It took unfolding the box—and a moment or two—before I could figure it out. My pizza box was made of juice boxes—or rather, four or so flattened juice boxes stamped on a single sheet of cardboard.

Of course, the juice boxes—which aren't an environmentally-smart choice in the first place—never had held juice. They hadn't even been punched out and shaped into individual boxes. The sheet of cardboard was a printer's goof—a misprint. The blurry pictures of apples made that clear.

Rather than toss out the poorly printed but otherwise pristine cardboard, someone enterprising had decided to reuse it by turning it inside out and folding it into a pizza box—one less pizza box the world needed to create from scratch. To my mind's eye, each box represented a tiny gesture—but a useful one. And by useful, I really mean reuseful. It's not a word, but it should be.

Once I'd gotten to the bottom of my pizza box mystery (and the end of my pie), I thought again about the Gallup results. It struck me that maybe it is a good thing so few of us worry a great deal about climate change. Worry only begets worry, after all. There are better ways to use our time. The three R's are one place to start.

Every cloud does have its silver lining. It's just sometimes you have to open a pizza box to find it.

Andrew Bridges is a science journalist and author who has written several books for Sally Ride Science, including Earth's Precious Resources: Clean Air.