I've never thought much about cardboard, except when I have to cut apart a box to put it into the recycling bin. But if you stop to think about all the boxes that get shipped out just from Amazon, it's worth taking a look at where it comes from and what happens to it after you're done with it.
The New York Times Magazine just published a long article about cardboard manufacturing. Like much modern manufacturing, the scale is amazing.
Every day, Walls told me proudly, the exercise was repeated enough times to paper over a two-lane highway from the gates of the mill almost to El Paso, Texas, 1,350 miles. Impressive in itself, but to get a real sense of the scale of the modern corrugated industry, you have to do some extrapolation: Take those 1,350 miles and add the output of the 25 other paper mills I.P. maintains from Georgia all the way out to Washington State. Add again the yield from the dozens of paper mills owned by the company’s competitors. Suddenly, you’re no longer talking about thousands of miles of paper, but millions of miles.
And it’s barely enough to meet demand: Cardboard manufacturers broke production records in 2021, and they’ve been breaking them basically every quarter since. By 2025, according to one estimate, the size of the international market for corrugated packaging will reach $205 billion, commensurate with the gross domestic product of New Zealand or Greece.
As well as describing the manufacturing process, the article describes the environmental impact. It may not be as much as you might suspect, as most of the trees are now farmed and about 91 percent of cardboard is recycled.
I've gifted the article from my subscription so it is outside of the paywall.
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