The Cardboard Recycling Process: From Waste to New Boxes

Cardboard boxes create a lot of bulk in household and commercial garbage. You may have a local collection service or a recycling site for old boxes. Recycling consists of soaking and pulping, mixing in new material and making mats for new boxes.

The Recycling Process

• Recycling cardboard at a plant begins with soaking it in water, agitating it to loosen and weaken the fibers. This creates a pulp.

Cleaning and Mixing

• The next steps consist of removing contaminants like metal and ink from the pulp and adding in chemicals and new pulp from wood chips. This creates the medium. Mixing more new pulp with recycled paper fibers creates the linerboard.

Making Mats

• A boxboard plant then uses machines to corrugate the medium. Gluing the linerboard to the medium makes flat mats. The manufacturer then trims and creases the mats.

Customers

• Customers buy the recycled mats and make them into new boxes for packing and shipping out their products.

Repeated Recycling

• Cardboard can undergo recycling as many as five times, but with each pulping process, its fibers shorten. Eventually they just fall apart. Recycled cardboard goes into making stationery, animal bedding, and even coffins, as well as new boxes.