Resources · field notes
Longer pieces, written between loads.
- Articles
- 5
- Written by
- Buyers and graders
- Sales pitch
- Minimal, we hope
Suggest a subject
If you have a packaging question that deserves two thousand words, tell us. We may well write it.
Editorial policy
Three rules for anything published here.
- Numbers or nothing. Every claim carries a figure, and every figure carries the condition it applies under.
- Include the inconvenient parts. Where used stock is the wrong answer, the article says so — there are several such passages, and they were not painful to write.
- Write it once, properly. No series, no drip campaign, no part two. If it needs updating we update the page.
Used vs new gaylords: the real cost
Unit price is the small half of the comparison. The full spreadsheet — freight, trips, damage rate, storage and the disposal cost at the end — usually reverses the intuitive answer.
12 min · March 2026
OpenHow to buy the right grade
Buying 1A when 3A would do is the most common and most expensive mistake in used packaging. A decision procedure that takes about four minutes.
9 min · February 2026
OpenWhat happens to a retired gaylord
Follow one failed box from the reject bench through the cutting table and the baler to a mill, with the weights, the destinations and the money at each step.
10 min · December 2025
OpenLoading a truck with gaylords
Floor-loading, double-stacking, banding, dunnage and the weight rules that decide whether your trailer cubes out or weighs out first.
11 min · October 2025
OpenRun a packaging waste audit
A one-week, clipboard-and-scale process that tells you exactly what your empties are worth before you call a single supplier.
11 min · September 2025
Open
In one line each
What every field note concludes.
The findings, without the working. Read the full piece if the conclusion surprises you — that is usually where the useful part is.
- Used vs new: the real cost
- Cost per trip, not unit price. Used 2A runs about $1.98 a trip against $4.06 for new, and the cheapest box on the list is the worst answer of all.
- How to buy the right grade
- Who sees the box sets your ceiling; what it must survive sets your floor. For most industrial use both answers point at 3A.
- What happens to a retired gaylord
- Three sound panels become fourteen layer pads worth $6.16. The same board baled is worth fifty cents.
- Loading a truck with gaylords
- Decide whether you will cube out or weigh out before the first pallet goes on. Above 45 lb/ft³ it is weight; below it is cube.
- Run a packaging waste audit
- Five days with a clipboard. Nearly every site finds it generates twice the reusable containers it believed, and is paying to destroy them.
Also worth reading
Where the journal goes deeper.
The five pieces here are the long ones. The yard journal has forty shorter posts, and these are the ones that pair best.
- Cost per trip is the only packaging metric that matters — the arithmetic in full
- The bottom edge is where boxes die — 61% of all our rejections, explained
- Flatten first: the freight math of empty boxes — a factor of forty-seven
- Humidity is the silent tax on your packaging — why summer stacks fail
- How we set a buying price — the six inputs, four of which you control
- What twelve months of grading data told us — source sector predicts condition
Read one, then ask us the follow-up.
Every article here started as a customer question. The next one probably starts as yours.