For a few years I was virtuous and attempted to eat locally all winter. As I have aged I have lost all my morals, and have given up such local pretensions. Instead I have been purchasing unethical Christmas oranges.
This year I have noticed a change in how these oranges are packaged. In previous years they would be shipped in wooden crates. Now the crates are made of corrugated cardboard.
This is kind of sad, because the wooden crates are part of what made unethical Christmas oranges special. However, I always struggled with throwing the wooden crates out, and now I feel few compunctions about breaking down the corrugated cardboard. That might be a bug, and not a feature.
Is corrugated cardboard more environmentally friendly than real wood? The Internet suggests that cardboard is highly recyclable and highly recycled, which is a good sign. The virgin wood that is used can probably be of a lower grade, which has the potential to be good if in some hypothetical universe we made cardboard from the scraps of wood we could not use for furniture. On the other hand cardboard is highly processed, and if the cardboard is waxed then it loses most of its recycling value. So in this, as in all questions, I am stuck.