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/

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.

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

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

>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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

Is cotton produftion less intensive than cardboard?

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.

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.

Reusable totes don’t really stack.