Where does all the cardboard come from? | Hacker News Reader

Where does all the cardboard come from?

nytimes.com

110 pointsjohnny313112 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20221129012054/https://www.nytim...

International Paper (the company profiled in this article) and most of the box manufacturers in the US use the software company I started, Lumi (YC W15)[0].

What is fascinating about these manufacturers is that many of them have been in business for more than 100 years and think on a multi-generational time scale. Managing forests and growing trees to turn them into boxes is a 25 year process.

There are a lot of old-timers working in these companies but I really enjoyed working with them. It's like we were the Hobbits interacting with Ents. They make decisions in a different way, and I found that refreshing. As a fast-moving startup it forced us to be aligned with their long term view of the world.

[0] https://www.lumi.com/

International Paper uses SAP for supply chain management.

Lumi lad, any idea what part of the supply chain Int Paper uses you for when not using SAP?

Different part of the business. IP is big :)

They use Lumi as a storefront and customer management platform primarily for the ecommerce market.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the 90%+ recycle rates for cardboard, which was much higher than other materials including aluminum cans (~50%). Of course, it would be better to re-use cardboard but the nature of the material and the way people and businesses use boxes makes it difficult in most cases.

For my own business, we almost never need to purchase boxes for outbound shipping because we can re-use boxes from our main supplier and inbound packages from Amazon and other sources.

Regardless, we have to recycle 75% of boxes that come into the office because we don't have enough outbound shipping that matches the box size.

Cardboard boxes get a decent amount of reuse around my house, and I'm sure many others. They're certainly better for reuse than bag/envelope style packaging.

But yeah, at the scale of a large business, reuse makes no sense, because sorting and classifying them is labor intensive.

IIRC the boxes that Wal-mart uses internally are marked "return for reuse, each box cost an average of $1"

But yeah, not so much for, say, Amazon

Thanks for sharing that $1 cost. It's for exactly this reason that we prefer to use many USPS Priority Mail flat rate mailers/boxes because they are free. In one case requiring a special cardboard tube, we looked into getting our own tubes but the cost was close to $3 unless you wanted to buy 1000 units. So we stuck with USPS "triangular tubes" which are included in the price of a $14 flat rate postage anywhere in the U.S.

>it would be better to re-use cardboard

Having worked in a few warehouse shipping centers, most of the boxes we get ourselves, we reuse to ship out. Doesn't even matter if it originally came from our factories. Amazon box? Ship out with it. Box from some random employee's home? Ship out with it. Rarely do new boxes get used. Only boxes we recycled were damaged boxes and when we positively just don't have any place to store the cardboard.

As a consumer, I've received parcels from smaller businesses that have been wrapped in probably 6th hand cardboard, by the look of it.

I'm not complaining. Reusing is much better than recycling

That actually endears me to businesses doing it.

I like what Costco is doing, instead of just recycling the boxes, they are left for people to carry their purchases. The boxes get another use (instead of using bags), people get free boxes, costco doesn't have to deal with the recycling. win-win-win

I guess the only losing side the is recycling company of the city.

Bunnings (a hardware store in Australia) does this too. There are big cages full of empty boxes just after the checkout.

I imagine the consumers who took their products home in the free box will then recycle the box. So the recycling company gets the box anyway and not another plastic bag.

This is normal is S. Korea, recycling company is not the losing side because they still get the cardboard from the residential area. In the apartment complex I lived in they haul a truck load of cardboard every other day.

IT still costs more money to haul cardboard from residential areas, compared to a large commercial building.

No, it really doesn't. Not when people live in condo buildings with hundreds of residents. Korea is not like America.

Every supermarket in NL does this and has done for at least 20 years. IIRC the UK supermarkets are the same.

In NL we also recycle most drinks bottles (you pay a small deposit on them which you get back when your return them).

Some places like grocery stores and I think even Wal-Mart used to keep big hoppers of cardboard boxes at the front that you could pick through and take whatever you wanted. That used to be the place to get boxes for shipping or moving. Talking like early 90s.

>I like what Costco is doing, instead of just recycling the boxes, they are left for people to carry their purchases.

This is really interesting. Growing up in Southern California, I remember always getting free boxes from Costco like this.

But for the past 15 years I've lived in the Bay Area, I can't say I've ever seen boxes readily offered- even to other people in the store. Maybe these locations are just so busy they run out quickly.

I haven’t driven in a year so maybe it’s changed but the Mountain View costco always offered boxes if you had a lot of purchases. The number of people doing what appears to be instacart or other company shopping for customers has skyrocketed during first year of Covid so those delivery services might be using many of the boxes they previously tried to give to customers.

> Maybe these locations are just so busy they run out quickly.

I kept thinking about this while shopping at Costco. The thing is, all the boxes that the products are shipped into Costco should be enough to send products from Costco to final consumers. There will be some inefficiencies in how shoppers pack their boxes, and also people taking more boxes because they need them for moving or something, but also there are people taking less boxes, or over-packing some boxes. All in all, I think a balance can be kept by the nature of the process itself, and it seems that way by studying my local Costco.

If a location is not doing that, it's probably intentional rather than a lack of enough boxes. Maybe they don't have enough floor space to store them? Maybe they are getting a very good deal on recycling?

Ik is actually pretty standard in the Netherlands to have a big box/container near the exit(s) where you can get a cardboard box.

Most often they are boxes for bananas or wine bottle boxes. Very convenient to carry stuff home if you forgot a bag.

> Entire forests and enormous factories running 24/7 can barely keep up with demand

> But no widely available shipping or packaging material can match cardboard’s recyclability, which hovers annually between 90 and 91 percent.

This begs the question: what is cardboard being recycled into?

More cardboard. The 10% not being recycled still requires a lot of trees.

Anyone who has worked retail and used the baler can attest to the sheer amount of cardboard that comes into a building, gets de-boxed and then goes right back out in the back of a semi-truck trailer. Most of the cardboard recycling isn't being done by consumers, it's done by businesses.

Prior to cardboard, stuff was shipped in wooden crates. So, a big improvement in terms of wood required to ship something.

On the other hand, it was easier to re-use the crates.

On the third hand, the empty wooden crates took up a lot of space to be shipped back, which required a lot more fuel and labor to re-use them rather than recycling the cardboard.

So on net, cardboard is a big positive. We may come up with a replacement for cardboard in the future that would be an even bigger positive.

> On the third hand, the empty wooden crates took up a lot of space to be shipped back, which required a lot more fuel and labor to re-use them rather than recycling the cardboard.

Wooden crates also have a lot more mass than cardboard, hence would require much more energy to move.

Are adhesive labels, tape, staples, etc. effectively separated from cardboard, or do those degrade the value of the recycled material?

From small experiments recycling paper, I'd guess that any kind of plastic or metal is trivial to separate, and any kind of paper gets mixed into the new cardboard. That probably degrades the recycled material, but very likely not enough to be the bottleneck.

I was part of a team that developed a business plan for reusing cardboard boxes with a collection plan. Our end plan was simple one for one reuse. There’s a company here that seems to have had some success. https://reboxcorp.com/

Corrugated cardboard is pretty incredible and strong stuff, and we also researched up-cycling cardboard into other products like furniture, picture frames, cabinets and more. As you say, most cardboard is downcycled into cereal boxes (box board.)

Also, if you don't reuse cardboard and instead put it in landfill then you now have a form of carbon capture!

Until it gets wet and is decomposed to CO2 and methane. Hopefully the landfill gas is burned instead of just being released to the atmosphere.

Wasn't the CO2 in the cardboard once in the atmosphere and absorbed by the tree when it was alive? So the net CO2 is the same, in the same carbon cycle.

Probably the same with methane: enters the atmosphere, gets decomposed in H2O and other stuff that go back to Earth and are still part of the same cycle.

Methane does ultimately turn back to CO2, but until it does it's a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. In any case, the decomposition in the landfill aborts the carbon storage argument, as the carbon is released back into the atmosphere.

I don’t think this is carbon capture in the sense that most people mean: you still had to expend a lot of energy to fell the tree and process it into cardboard. Putting it somewhere where it won’t decompose will probably only prevent a tiny percentage of the carbon required to produce it. Thus the goal of cutting down fewer trees, and thus reusing and recycling.

What would happen if we stopped recycling cardboard? We would have to have more tree farms and we would have a decent size carbon dioxide sink assuming we bury cardboard in a landfill.

My grandfather was a corrugated cardboard box salesman for Container Corp of America back in the day. A lot of the cardboard then was coming from trees in northern Maine. All that paper industry is pretty much gone now. Not because there aren't any trees left, but because it's cheaper to harvest and process wood in other places now

I just assumed oregon. Apparently the locals tell me, the owl scare of the 80s that killed most lumber companies on west coast, was simply lobbying and scare tactics by east coast lumber companies. And it worked very well. But who knows.

Owl scare of the 80s? What?

https://www.nwpb.org/2020/12/03/much-more-than-a-spotted-owl...

I recently read a book on managing forests "A Landowners Guide to Harvesting Your Woods" and one of the salient points in the book is the fact that the majority of woodlands in the northeast are now privately held, (relatively) small parcels, that don't get harvested for a number of reasons.

1) Scarcity messaging over the last decades have created new property owners who see tree harvest as a moral outrage. 1a) Property owners aren't managing small private woodlots for harvestable lumber. 2) Harvesting small woodlots does not offer necessary economies of scale needed by harvesting operations, i.e., they're not going to invest the time to harvest < 20 acre plots.

> 2) Harvesting small woodlots does not offer necessary economies of scale needed by harvesting operations, i.e., they're not going to invest the time to harvest < 20 acre plots.

There are small sawmills that don't operate quite in the same economies of scale that the larger ones do. They've still got challenges and your first two points are still very applicable.

https://www.marketplace.org/2021/06/10/small-sawmill-sees-gr...

https://www.marketplace.org/2022/11/07/tough-housing-market-...

The second one is the more applicable one for this case (note: the transcript is abridged - listen to the full version).

One of the things that they specialize in for small lots (home owner) is storm damage.

It also depends on what the trees were planted for, around here there's lots of pulp trees that are really only used for paper, not boards.

And the amount you "make" with such logging is barely enough to overcome the taxes you pay, even if the land is classified as special tax-reduced forestry land.

Trees on small private lots also greatly increase the property value. A clear-cut private plot? Not worth nearly as much as the plot with the 300 year old old-growth.

Same in parts of the Upper Midwest. I assume land prices and labor laws/practices are among the primary causes for these shifts.

They mentioned bamboo, and I'm surprised nobody has done this, but you could build a machine to weave extremely sturdy and reusable boxes out of bamboo fiber. They would of course be more expensive, heavier, and bulkier, but they would pay for themselves may times over in time. Reusing them could be as simple as a return center or pick-up service. As padding, you could stuff the empty space in the box with shredded bamboo. They'd be weather-resistant, tough, flexible, and stronger than steel. And growing more stock takes a fraction of the time and cost compared to trees.

What if all the bamboo grown is already used for other things? A whole new box industry would need new supply.

Bamboo is a grass, and very fast growing. Some of the running species are vigorous enough to be considered invasive outside its native ecosystem. (The running bamboos spread via rhizomes, a couple feet deep, making them extremely difficult to get rid of once established). They can grow, be harvested, and regrow again faster than many trees, even if those trees are coppiced. They also produce a woody like construction material that is more durable than some of the fast growing trees (such as balsa).

Point being, growing more bamboo is easier than growing more trees in order to supply something like cardboard.

>They would of course be more expensive, heavier, and bulkier, but they would pay for themselves may times over in time

The most expensive parts of any thing are almost always human labor and energy (for transportation mostly), so it is unlikely that this would be true from any holistic point of view.

Generally speaking, in today's economy reuse is a bug, not a feature.

We could already reuse thick plastic packaging instead of cardboard, but we don't, because it's so much more expensive to collect, clean/sanitize, sort by 40 different sizes, and store in a warehouse.

Heck, we could already reuse glass soda bottles the way they still do in many developing countries around the world, instead of recycling them to melt them down and form new bottles. But again we don't, because the cost of collecting separate streams for each brand of soda bottle is too expensive in the developed world.

So while the idea of reusable bamboo packaging could be appealing, them problem is in the reuse part sadly. Much more economically efficient to produce something one-use, put it in a general recycling stream, and then re-form.

Glass recycling (as in refilling) is done all over Europe. I’m surprised it’s not done where you live. So it’s certainly done in the developed world.

Yeah, the dairies here in New England do it as well.

There's a dairy that delivers in parts of the midwest that uses glass bottles for their milk products. They charge a $2 deposit when you buy the milk. Pretty good milk in my opinion, though more expensive than the bulk milk, but I like supporting a local dairy, and knowing I'm not filling up a landfill lets me sleep better at night.

https://www.burbachscountrysidedairy.com

Oberweis Dairy in Northern IL does the same. I’ve been told that it gives the product a premium feel, which helps justify the price premium.

Strauss family farms does that in the SF Bay Area, available at all the fancy grocery stores.

Same in Phoenix (Danzeisen Dairy i think), and Oberweis around western suburbs of Chicago at least.

How does the landfill usage compare to the extra energy used to transport the greater mass of glass? And the extra energy use of the frequent stop and go of a smaller residential delivery truck moving heavy liquids and glass, and the resulting brake/tire dust.

They don't do residential delivery, they just supply the grocery stores.

Everyone has a tale of ridiculous overpackaging. IE Thumb drive in shoplifter-proof plastic, wrapped in bubble wrap, in a double layered cardboard shoebox.

We have standards for transport. Shipping containers, pallets. But not a widely used standard for packaging various things.

But then I guess it'd be subject to standards proliferation: https://xkcd.com/927/

> because the cost of collecting separate streams for each brand of soda bottle is too expensive in the developed world.

Then we just make a standard set of bottles and make them pay a much larger collection bond on any non-standard bottle which is split with the collection center on reuse.

No reason we have to tolerate waste just so each brand can feel like a special snowflake.

The payoff for this kind of standardization would be enormous. Bottles are one example. Books are another. If books were made in universally standardized shapes, then bookshelves could be sized to fit them without wasted space, and so on.

Here in Japan, that's exactly how it is for books: most popular novels and such come in just a few standard sizes. Books from the same publisher usually have the same color pattern on the jacket too. Bookshelves look very neat and tidy as a result.

My dad worked for Mead Containers for many years. If he was reading this he would complain because technically 'cardboard' as everyone calls it is really 'corrugated'. The corrugated board is made from multiple layers of 'cardboard'.

The author hears you:

> Paper people tend to scoff at the word “cardboard,” which they consider inaccurate and a little gauche.

... but yeah, it'll be probably the equivalent of "blockchain" or "AI"/"machine learning", there's a nuance that bothers some people.

Or “crypto” to mean anything other than math.

I use "crypto" only when talking about Big Foot or a Chupacabra.

As in, something a lot of people really really believe in but... the truth is scarier than fiction!

Could also be cryptosporidium. One ill child could infect a whole pool if you swallow some pool water...

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cryptosporidium%20pool...

Yes, all pine foresters can afford to silviculturally thin their forest estates, on time, so they produce larger, more valuable sawlogs in the future.

The pulplog and residues go into making cardboard to protect valuable products in their journey to customers, reducing damage and waste.

And as a bonus, it reduces the mega fire risk of the forests.

A win for forests and animals, a win for the customer, a win for employees, a win for investors, thank you Mr Pratt.

One of the best industries in the world. I deeply root for them and hope that they can defeat plastic in all of its evil forms. I already see cardboard water bottles in stores, hopefully beer etc is next. Paper is truly incredible stuff.

I wish we could simply return cardboard boxes to e.g. amazon (who drives every neighborhood daily)

and check a box “I prefer recycled boxes” to signal that you don’t mind using a second hand box for your delivery.

You may be receiving second hand boxes already. When I ship products out, it's generally in a clean Amazon box. No one has complained yet.

I've always wondered if, for example, Amazon, could be using reusable totes instead of cardboard. I get that they'd have to transport them back and they have weight, but they deliver regularly enough to my house that it seems doable now - maybe just for monthly things like subscribe and save.

They tried to do that with Amazon Fresh. Their delivery folks didn't pick up the bags when they were left out, though, even when Amazon said they would.

The failure of the employee doomed the policy. There's no way to defend against that

But why? Recently had one of those amzn pull baskets (for small packages) left forgotten on our street. Told next delivery peeps several times, they wouldn’t take it.

Exception handling is usually a specific job in logistics, often titled 'problem solve' or similar. The people doing delivery routes only have the time/information/procedures in place to do their assigned tasks. They probably don't have the time, space, or information to determine what to do with that basket. It was someone else's job assignment.

I know that “computer” used to be a profession. But who would have thought “exception handler” was one, too?

"Pay delivery people a wage that makes them care" is an option.

Doubtful. It's just easier to not do it and take the new wages. You'd have to eliminate everyone, and start over. Doubtful performance reviews would motivate them either with/without said raise.

Just have a machine back at the Amazon pickup point that farts out quarters when given boxes, suddenly all the employees will be picking them up.

This is the reason nobody ever does any of the work they're paid to do. Easier not to, right?

When the precedent has been established as doing less than expected and no negative ramifications, it is difficult to get those same employees to change. If you have good employees already, then that's the norm.

I've had good and bad experiences with Amazon delivery. I have no idea if those good/bad experiences are from 3rd party people hired by Amazon or if they are Amazon employees. Doesn't matter to the end user though. Just like in any large organization, there will always be lower performing workers. When you're so desperate that you cannot eliminate these workers, then there is no incentive to change. Just like other uniform wearing services, it's the "bad apples" that get all of the attention, and they are probably vastly out numbered by the good apples. That's just not how society works by focusing on the good when there's so much more traction by beating on the negatives (just look at the socials and their entire core functionality).

Amazon logistics, at least in my area, pays significantly more than competitors. They had to, in order to accomplish the insane growth they've undergone over recent years. However, they've also had to reduce their hiring standards to somewhere around "can you fog a mirror".

It is really not possible to understate how insane their hiring growth is. I think the only organizations in history to grow their headcount faster are militaries under periods of conscription. And currently, the only two organizations with a larger total headcount... are the worlds' two largest militaries.

Here in my area, they pay about the same as UPS or FedEx (UPS also does a lot of the Amazon delivery).

And there remain more ways to incentivize--like I would, genuinely, pay more on my Prime subscription if the delivery folks would pay attention both to the note in my account and the sign on the door to deliver to the back of my house instead of placing them in the front. In fact the status quo is probably worse, because I have to check both because some deliveries end up at the back (and did before there was a sign, even!).

I consider myself lucky that the package is delivered to anywhere on my property. I have found them lying in the driveway, seemingly thrown from the vehicle as it passed by. It's not all that uncommon to have to hunt down missing packages at the neighbor's houses.

I don't pay for Prime because when I did, nothing improved.

Delivery predictability (this close to a major hub, a lot of stuff is overnight and everything is two-day shipping) and the occasional television show (one very other week or so) is why I keep paying for Prime. Also, they gave me GrubHub+ for a year as part of it, so hey.

My wife’s company had an issue where a courier was delivering packages to a garbage can at the front door.

Deliver as is “place the MacBook in the bin”

That's an extra service provided free of charge called "Hide the item from porch pirates".

Given amazon's mission is essentially the same as the military, that's not surprising. Deliver goods anywhere in the world in short notice and massive throughput.

The people shooting at the end just adds another 8% to headcount.

Seems ripe for use in a sci-fi: "Today just two armies dominate the world, Amazon and Walmart. Some historians claim they started out as retail services, but this is widely debated says historian Dan Wells, from the University of US-West1."

I see devs online making $200k brag about working 4 hours a week and gaming and sleeping on the clock.

"Paying enough to care" isn't a thing. It doesn't exist.

You still need accountability. Where’s the manager?

A company the size of Amazon, you have to ask a follow up of "which one?"

It's extremely time consuming to collect bags, stage bags at the fcs, and the bags have to be cleaned between uses which would negate any environmental savings.

The way to do it would be a deposit-style setup. Each basket is charged to you as a dollar, and you return it and get the dollar back, or something.

But the reality is cardboard is too cheap and easy to use - even major companies like Walmart use cardboard boxes (that do have a "please return this, it costed us a dollar" on it) instead of plastic or metal.

Is cotton produftion less intensive than cardboard?

OP is maybe talking about a plastic tote, but what really matters is how many times you can reuse it. I don't know about cardboard, but iirc for the plastic vs. canvas bag comparison I believe the break-even is on the order of 20 uses to 1. i.e. if you can use the canvas bag 20 times more than the plastic bag before discarding it, the canvas bag is less resource intensive.

It's much much much worse than that. Almost 3 orders of magnitude.

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/04/30/plastic-paper-c...

" In addition, they are difficult to recycle since textile recycling in the U.S. is limited—only 15.2 percent of all textiles were recycled in 2017. As a result, a cotton bag needs to be used 7,100 times to equal the environmental profile of a plastic bag."

Looking around it seems estimates vary by a fair bit, and the one you cite is on the high end. Other estimates are in the low hundreds, which is a very attainable number of reuses. But it does seem my memory was unrealistically low. Also an aspect that is not considered in these studies is that canvas bags generally carry more stuff per bag than single use plastic ones, so taking 2 canvas bags to the grocery store can save 6 or 8 plastic bags.

The difference seems to be how far down the rabbithole you go - are you only tracking the energy to make/ship/(hopefully recycle) the bag or, as the study I linked does, goes all the way back to the plant in the field. Cotton is very water intensive.

Yes, I was thinking about what I used to unload when I unloaded trucks for a retailer [1]. But maybe not so fancy - something solid an re-usable.

[1] e.g. https://reusabletrans.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads... (not the best link, but what I could find doing a quick search)

Edit: I just realized that the word "tote" could have meant a bag of some sort. When I used to unload them everyone was calling them "totes", as in "unload that tote" and I hadn't thought about the word use until now. Though an image search for "totes" is mostly what I'm talking about: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=totes&t=ffab&iar=images&iax=images...

I'd be shocked if it was. Cotton production isn't very green in any of its forms.

Seem like one could devise a system where they don't have to make the full circuit each time: Give each one a unique QR code. If you need a box, query by dimensions and pay to have the nearest one shipped to you. If it happens to be in the house across the street, shipping will probably be cheap--or you can walk over and get it.

Reusable totes don’t really stack.

When Amazon fresh started out they had these insulated reusable heavy dusty bagsYou were supposed to return the bag with your next order. Eventually they stopped using the heavy duty insulated bags and just used cardboard with the small insulated bubble wrap inside. A similar delivery service would collect the bubble wrap but wouldn’t take the boxes. I often had clean boxes I wish they have taken also. I currently use a service that drops all the food off in a big metal box we leave on the porch: nothing to exchange or dispose of. I like this last arrangement the best, but I understand why that doesn’t scale very well and isn’t practiced by all services delivering perishable goods.

There’s a German startup called LivingPackets. They advertised heavily on YouTube to attract investors. “Imagine you had invested in one of the big internet companies” was one of their lines. I think the BaFin stepped in (federal agency for regulation of the finance sector). Don’t know if they still exist.

Has anyone tried Audm (the company that narrates such articles)? Their product seems great for articles like these. However I don't see yet why one would pay for a service such as this over countless free high-quality podcasts.

Ironically, the NYT acquired Audm

Long term, when fossil fuels are done, things like cardboard will be viewed as valuable resources of reduced carbon, for conversion to things that are currently petrochemicals. Plastic feedstocks, jet fuel, other chemicals.

This article makes it sound like cardboard is never made from recycled material. Even hearing that 91% of cardboard gets recycled after, it was a bit shocking to me. Does anyone know more about why this is the case?

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