Don’t Forget Cardboard! Optimizing Recycling this Season & Year Round
The arrival of short days and cold weather means the holidays are rapidly approaching. Along with that comes presents from friends and loved ones. While we naturally think of the gifts themselves as precious, the boxes they come in also are valuable, for both their contributions to the economy and how they help us be environmentally responsible during this festive season. In Massachusetts alone, more than 13,000 people work in the Commonwealth’s 2,000 recycling businesses, and individual contributions to recycling are critical to support those jobs and businesses.
Containerboard, the material used to make the cardboard boxes that online purchases arrive in, is widely recycled. And, in fact, in many states cardboard recycling is mandated. In 2017, 36 percent of all paper recovered for recycling was used to make the very cardboard boxes used to ship all of those holiday gifts. The recovery rate for cardboard boxes themselves is also consistently high, reaching almost 90 percent in 2017.[i].
New York has maintained one of the most successful recycling programs in the nation for close to three decades. Waste360 ranked New York the…