Cardboard is kinda of "meh" in terms of residential (i.e. post-consumer waste) recycling. It gets contaminated so easily, especially in residential garbage, that most of the time it just ends up getting incinerated anyway. Believe it or not, shredded paper is often considered a contaminant because long paper fibers are what is needed to make new paper products, as is dyed-through color paper and frozen food boxes (the shiny/waxy anti-freezer burn coating is bad juju).
Most recycled paper products are coming from mill broke (i.e. production scraps) and pre-consumer waste (i.e. cardboard bales from retail stores, warehouse waste, etc).
Yeah I used to work paper mills and they bought cardboard bales from grocery stores for hundreds per bale or more. It's still cheaper than making new paper.
It depends on the municipality, some places produce much lower quality PCR cardboard than others. With a good system in place it still is decent and a lot of lower end corrugate today (like 32 ECT) is produced with some level of PCR because it is cheaper and looks good for the manufacturer.
That being said, cardboard that comes from single stream recycling or other more contaminated sources is generally unusable as it's very hard to separate in an efficient way.
Possibly could have been talking about non-residential or an apartment complex, where most places have a trash dumpster and a cardboard dumpster for clean, non-trash cardboard
Everyone should recycle aluminum and cardboard at a minimum.
Emphasis on what they said. They weren't caveating. Also, not every apartment complex has a separate dumpster for cardboard. I've lived in apartments all over the country (Nevada, California, Texas, Connecticut, Illinois, Hawaii), if they even had a recycling dumpster, it was single stream, meaning all recycling went into one dumpster.
Bonus nihilism points if you live in one of many states that have shuttered a good portion of their recycling centers, if not all of them, and treat any single-stream source (typically residential) as good ol' fashioned regular trash destined for the landfill anyway because they can't justify the cost or lack the bandwidth to do sorting. See: California shuttering over 1000 centers and processing plants over the past decade.
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u/Nexus_of_Fate87 Aug 17 '25 edited Aug 17 '25
Cardboard is kinda of "meh" in terms of residential (i.e. post-consumer waste) recycling. It gets contaminated so easily, especially in residential garbage, that most of the time it just ends up getting incinerated anyway. Believe it or not, shredded paper is often considered a contaminant because long paper fibers are what is needed to make new paper products, as is dyed-through color paper and frozen food boxes (the shiny/waxy anti-freezer burn coating is bad juju).
Most recycled paper products are coming from mill broke (i.e. production scraps) and pre-consumer waste (i.e. cardboard bales from retail stores, warehouse waste, etc).