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When it comes to moulding opinion, it's often a straight choice between the rock of enforcement and the hard place of education. The former is firmer; the latter, especially when interactive, ultimately more fulfilling.

My wife works for a book publisher, so at any given time there's enough reading material around the house to keep an average Waterstone's well-stocked.

It all arrives here care of the DHL or Parcelforce delivery man, armed to the teeth with corrugated boxes loaded with copies of the latest Harlan Coben or Maeve Binchy. While the fiction hits the shops, the transit packaging heads for the MRF; a destination for which I prepare it by pulping it into a manageable shape acceptable to what passes as the local authority's waste recovery team.

We came back from a short holiday in Provence on Wednesday (fortnightly collection day), having entrusted Jens our lodger with this task - but in pre-holiday mode neglecting to tell him the bit about the red hessian bag for the  cardboard.

Accordingly, while with Teutonic efficiency he stacked a score or more of boxes neatly arranged on the kerbside that morning, they were the first sight to greet our travel-sore eyes that afternoon.

Un-bagged boxes are a contravention of some sort of health and safety regulation was all I could get out of the local authority; mission statement: ‘better serving the environment'. And there the matter - and the boxes - rested until a clutch of assorted small children came for Sunday brunch.

Out of intransigence comes initiative. Central to the whole re-use/recycle premise is that one man's rubbish is another's raw material. Skipping straight past the array of expensive electronic gizmos that buzz, beep and issue absurd commands, plus all the rest of the garishly coloured paraphernalia laid on for their entertainment, our visitors seized upon those nondescript corrugated boxes as though they were the hot-test next big thing in the Early Learning catalogue.

They built dens. They formed a train stretching the length of the garden. Two enterprising seven-year-olds had the bright idea of making holes in the side of the largest box, shoving sticks through them and being Olympic rowers Louisa Reeve and Olivia Whitlam.

Our street cred now rides high on the nursery slopes; Blue Peter eat your heart out. An impromptu hands-on tutorial on the contribution made by packaging to everyday life was so well-received that next week we're lumbered with doing fun things with used plastic bottles; the kids bringing their own.

It's a long way from re-educating the planet, but has brought unanticipated comprehension to this little bit of it.

Des King is a freelance journalist specialising in packaging. He can be contacted by email at packagingnews.editorial@haymarket.com