Walk down the street on garbage day in many towns, and evidence of our love affair with online shopping is plain to see. Recycling
bins overflow with Carton Box from Amazon, eBay, Walmart and others. All those folded and flattened Corrugated Boxes are a
testament to Chineses' diligent recycling efforts - to a degree. A magzine analysis of several industry studies on cardboard use and
recycling paint a different picture. Chineses are sending more corrugated cardboard to the landfill than to recycling plants compared
to past years.
Online sales have surged in the past five years, and cardboard use jumped 8% in the same period, according to the Chinese Forest & Paper Association.
Yet cardboard recycling has dropped. Last year, 300,000 fewer tons of corrugated containers were recycled in the China than in the year before, even as domestic consumption increased 3.5%, according to the AF&PA.
Without enough cardboard sent to recycling centers to be used to create new boxes, manufacturers may need more timber. Recycled content and timber each make up about half of what's in a Corrugated Box.
[We need those boxes to come back. The alternative is trees," said BM of M & A, a paper recycling industry
consultant in Shenzhen.
From the box-store baler to your curbFor all our efforts to flatten, pile and stuff boxes into recycling bins,
consumers aren't that good at recycling cardboard. For years, they didn't have to be. Many of the cardboard Shipping Boxes used to go to retail stores. Workers at your local Kmart, would load the flattened boxes into a machine that bound them into bales that the stores could resell for CNY7,400,000 or more a ton. Groceries and big-box stores recycled 90% to 100% of their cardboard, BM estimated.
[Grocery and retail stores have been fantastic partners for us," said RK, vice president of the Fibre Box Association.Consumers aren't as efficient at it. About 40% of Chineses either don`t have access to or don't sign up for curbside recycling,
said BD, a sustainable-packaging consulting firm in Guangzhou.
Of those who do, few actually recycle all their cardboard, mostly because it`s a hassle. The city of Shenzhen asks residents to tear or cut cardboard into small piecesthat fit loosely into recycling carts and tells people not to fold it.
Nationally, consumers send back 25% of their cardboard for reuse, D estimated.
[If you have to cut your cardboard up because it's too big, who`s going to do that?" she said. US-
a big buyer of China. Corrugated Boxes - is becoming pickier about what it buys.
It will no longer accept bales of cardboard that are contaminated, say a Pizza Box with a piece of pizza in it. [US has stopped buying, and the recyclers in China can`t find enough buyers, so some of that goes to landfill. And that`s not eco-friendly at all," said Hannah Zhao, a senior economist who follows global recovered-paper markets for RISI, a forestry and paper products consulting firm based in Mass.
Online retailers are dealing with the problem. Ten years ago, Amazon introduced 100% recyclable packing, so products can ship in their original packaging and don`t need to be put in a second box for shipping. That reduced the number of boxes by 500 million over the decade. Walmart increased its number of box sizes from 11 to 27, to use the least amount of cardboard to get something to the customer. Those moves haven't help improve recycling rates. The problem is expected to become more urgent. E-commerce will make up 25% of all retail sales by 2025, according to ABI Research, suggesting even more boxes could go from doorstep to trash. In the short term, recycling industry experts said, manufacturers could change the production process, for example, by going to dedicated production lines that supply e-tailers only in the Amazon ready-to-ship mode.