Cardboard box recycling is dumb

Going to the effort to engineer a cardboard box which gets used once and then recycled is beyond dumb, yet this is standard practice. I am sure like me you have thought

Why doesn't some other company reuse this perfectly good piece of engineered tree based packaging?

I went to RWM last week. This is a very large waste management conference for those who do not know. I have been quite a few times. I have lost count how many. I love walking around and taking pics of all the kit and talking to exhibitors and attendees. A few things caught my eye this year, which you might be interested in. I am going to do a few different posts about this and here is the first one.

I saw a stand where the promise was to collect cardboard boxes from large organisations and instead of recycle them (Standard. Dumb.), the boxes are sorted into their various sizes and then resold to be reused.

The unwanted cardboard boxes are collected by the business; Sadlers Carton Stockholders.

The customers providing the boxes get paid for the boxes.

Sadlers Carton Stockholders take them back to their depot tidy them up and sell them on the market to be used again by other manufacturers for cheaper than new boxes.

This is a reuse win win win!

This is great news and something I've only seen once before. So I thought I'd pull out my phone and do an on the spot interview with the guys making this promise.

Daniel: This looks interesting. What's your name and what do you do?

Gavin: Gavin Sadler, Head of Sales. Sadlers Carton Stockholders.

Gavin: This is Mark.

Daniel: Nice to meet you Mark.

Mark: Nice to meet you.

Daniel: What do you guys do?

Gavin: We reuse cardboard boxes. Factories across the UK generate cardboard boxes as part of their production process and it's part of their waste stream.

We ask them to segregate the boxes that they get, score the tape, flatten down the boxes and just put them onto a palette. Instead of going to the baler, once they've got a decent-sized palette together, that can be put onto one of our vehicles. We can offer a trailer on-site so they just put it straight into the trailer, they phone us when the trailer is full. We swap it over for an empty one and that's how the scheme works.

Daniel: Awesome. What do you to reuse the boxes? What happens to them?

Gavin: We sell those on. We've got a customer base of about 4000 different customers.

Daniel: Brilliant. They're going out to your customers who specify the size and shape and that sort of thing.

Gavin: Yes.

Daniel: You take it back to your depot, sort it out into different sizes and shapes, sell it on.

Gavin; That's it, yes.

Daniel: Really good. Do you clean it up a little bit or ...

Gavin: We do just go through and if anything's wet we'll scrap it. Any branding on them is not an issue.

Daniel: What's your charge to the customer to collect the old boxes? What's your business model?

Gavin: We don't charge for the service.

Daniel: Right, so you sell the cardboard boxes, that's your only revenue?

Gavin: Yes, but we actually pay the supplier, i.e the factory.

Daniel: Oh, you pay them?

Gavin: Yes.

Daniel: There's a revenue in it for them as well.

Gavin: Yes.

Daniel: Right, this is awesome. My customers will love this I will stick it in our newsletter.

Gavin: We pay them above the waste price, generally starting around £125 a Ton.

Daniel: Great, Lovely, that's all I need. My customers in Uni's and NHS will love this.

Mark, what is your top tip there for Universities?

Mark: For the Universities obviously they get lots of products in that they're emptying out of boxes, they're selling the boxes for recycling, not really making any money from them. The students have to move into halls every year or move house, why not sell them to the students or give them to the students?

Daniel: Great idea I shall pass that on!

So there you have it. If you are generating cardboard boxes as part of your operations. Get a better revenue by reusing rather than recycling.