Taking pages from interactive fads Where's George? and Flat Stanley, Columbia is using social media to encourage people to reuse shipping containers.

The company last month launched A Box Life, a website for tracking the travels of boxes which have been shipped to multiple locations. The process starts when customers choose a previously used box for their order. The box has a tracking code on the outside, which people then enter online to see where it's been before sending it off to another destination to see where it winds up.

So far 66 percent of customers have chosen to be nice to trees by selecting used boxes during their purchase. Columbia is trying to make tracking boxes more fun by creating Flickr and Twitter accounts for people to post how and where they are using the boxes.

If people will go for tracking money and taking pictures of paper men, then encouraging box reuse should be enough to get the green crowd engaged.