Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.)

>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.

>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.

> 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?

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com