Have you ever ordered something tiny, only for it to arrive at your door in a huge box? The rise of next-day shipping and Amazon Prime has simplified holiday gift buying and errand-running for most of us – but it sure has added to our consumption of cardboard and paper products.
Clearly, online shopping is immensely popular: 58.3 percent of global Internet users bought products online in 2016, a figure that’s expected to rise to 63 percent in 2019. And in 2017 alone, Amazon shipped more than 5 billion items worldwide through its Prime service alone.
That represents a tremendous amount of cardboard that’s being made into boxes, shipped around the country, getting dismantled and ending up in recycling bins. Average consumers can simply put those bins out for city workers to pick up on recycling day. Getting rid of all that used cardboard isn’t so simple for businesses, though. It would take one massive recycling bin to hold the boxes from a shipment of 100 new computers or a huge delivery of office supplies, to say nothing of the massive quantities of paper that many businesses generate each month.
So what’s a company to do? Well, you could gather up all your used cardboard, paper products and other recyclables and find a recycling facility that will accept them – or better yet, pay for them. Or you could send all that stuff off to a local facility and get hit with a bill.
Whether or not your company makes money or loses money from your recycled paper products depends on the word that sends shivers down recyclers’ spines: contamination.
Why does contamination matter?
Contamination isn’t just a problem for recycling cardboard boxes: it affects the recycling of all products, including other types of paper. When recyclers talk about contamination, we aren’t just talking stuck-on food and grease splatters. A big shipment of used cardboard and paper products is contaminated if it contains plastic, metal and other materials.
That’s not something the average consumer thinks about when filling a recycling bin with greasy pizza boxes, old newspapers and empty aluminum cans. But contamination is a big deal for recyclers, and it can be a big deal for businesses that are hoping to profit from the sale of their recyclable paper products.
When a contaminated load of cardboard or mixed paper arrives at a recycling facility, workers must first assess the extent of the problem and sort the other recyclables and trash from the usable paper products. That process contributes to the facility’s labor costs. If anything that’s sorted out has to be landfilled, that incurs more labor costs and landfill tipping fees. And if contaminated products make it past workers and end up passing through the facility’s machinery, they may cause damage to the equipment.
All of those costs get passed on to the companies responsible for the supplying the contaminated loads. And if disposing of those recyclables actually costs money, the recycling facility will require the supplier to pay the tab.
Getting top dollar for recycled paper products
Businesses that receive a lot of shipments and need to dispose of large quantities of cardboard and other paper products can avoid contamination, simply by educating workers about better recycling practices. Provide dedicated containers for used cardboard and paper products to keep them separate from other types of recyclables. Stress the importance of only throwing clean products into those bins and throwing dirty paper products into trash bins.
Avoiding contamination is really simple, but it might take a little while to retrain a large group of people on how to dispose of their paper products and cardboard. It’s an effort worth making, considering that careful recycling practices can pay off both environmentally and financially.
Have any questions about your cardboard and paper recycling needs? Contact Miller Recycling today.