Have you ever questioned how sustainable corrugated packaging is? They are eco-friendly not just because of their materials but also their recyclability. We could now take a close look into the lifespan of corrugated cardboard with Botta Packaging and some fun facts about them.
The benefit of corrugated cardboard
Cardboard is a milestone in the recycling era. In fact, according to businesswaste.co.uk, it would take 17 trees on average 7000 gallons of water and 42,000 kilowatts of energy to produce a ton of cardboard if there was no recycle made. Instead of using new paper from cut-down trees, cardboard uses a high percentage of recycled fiber from used paper. Old cardboard itself could be recycled into new cardboard. Corrugated cardboard form, which is strengthened by s-shaped flutes inside 2 flat-faces and commonly used as packing material, could be made by 100% recycled paper fiber. That’s why packaging from corrugated cardboard is seen as a sustainable packaging for business.
The lifespan of a corrugated cardboard
For new paper made from a tree, woods are brought to papermill for producing pulp – the tiny fibers of cellulose. Paper pulps are dried and flattened to become new paper.
With corrugated cardboard, it could be made from used paper. Used paper is handled by chemicals or papermill to become the new pulp. In this stage, less energy is needed to crush the used paper than to crash the new wood chip.
This pulp needs to go through several processes of cleaning to eliminate contaminants like ink, glue, plastic… before being pressed to form the long sheets. For some kinds of paper boxes, a certain small amount of new pulp from wood chips might be added.
Used paperboard and corrugated cardboard could be reused, but if they are not, they could be sent back to the paper mill for recycling. The used cardboard collection is a problem every country needs to coop with.
According to paperrecycles.org, up to 92 percent of old corrugated cardboard were recycled in 2019; while only 66.2 percent of the paper, in general, was recycled in the same year. So, you can imagine how “green” the corrugated cardboard is, compared to other packaging materials.
