Key takeaways
- Our routes out of the building: 71% reused as-is, 12% reconditioned, 6% fabricated, 11% baled, 0% landfilled.
- The proportions, not the no-landfill policy, are the honest measure of a reuse company.
- What gets baled is rarely whole boxes — it is damp board, delaminated panels, crushed edges and cutting offcuts.
- A box baled is worth about a dollar; sold as 3A it is worth seven or eight, and cut into pads about six.
Any company can say it does not send material to landfill. It is a low bar and increasingly everybody clears it. The more useful question is what proportion of incoming material takes each route out of the building — and almost nobody publishes that.
Ours, for the last twelve months
| Route | Share | What it means | Environmental position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reuse as-is | 71% | Graded, banded, sold to run again | Highest — no pulping, no water, no heat |
| Recondition, then reuse | 12% | Bench repair, then back into stock | Very high — a little labour, no pulping |
| Fabricate into parts | 6% | Cut into pads, dividers, trays | High — board keeps its finished form |
| Bale as OCC | 11% | Mill feedstock | Good, and the last resort |
| Landfill | 0% | Written policy since 2019 | — |
Why the ratio matters more than the policy
A company that receives used containers and bales seventy per cent of them is a recycler. That is a legitimate and necessary business — but it is operating one rung down the waste hierarchy from where it could be, and describing it as circular packaging is a stretch.
The difference is not equipment. It is willingness to do slow work: opening every box, grading against a written standard, holding inventory by footprint, running a repair bench that is never going to be a profit centre on its own. Baling is faster and easier and it is why the default drifts there.
Anyone can install a baler. The expensive decision is the four people standing between the dock and the baler, deciding what should not go into it.
What actually ends up baled
Not what people assume. It is rarely whole boxes and mostly parts of them:
- Damp or previously wet board, which cannot be reused or cut.
- Panels with delamination — liners separating from flutes.
- Crushed vertical edges, where the load path is gone.
- Offcuts from the cutting table.
- Tape, labels and adhesive residue separated during processing.
- Occasionally, whole loads rejected for odour or residue, which we decline to sell to anyone.
The economics, honestly
Baled OCC is worth market price per ton, which over the past two years has swung between roughly sixty and a hundred and ten dollars. A twenty-four-pound gaylord baled is therefore worth somewhere around a dollar.
The same box sold as 3A stock is worth seven or eight. The same box cut into fourteen layer pads is worth six. The incentive to grade carefully is not moral, it is arithmetic — which is precisely why we would encourage anybody buying used packaging to ask a supplier what happens to their rejects.
Where baling is genuinely right
For board that is actually spent, recycling is excellent and we are glad it exists. Corrugated recovery in North America works, the mills want the fibre, and the alternative is a landfill.
The problem is never recycling. It is recycling arriving first, applied to containers that had three or four working lives left.
Questions