[tppiotrowski]

> Entire forests and enormous factories running 24/7 can barely keep up with demand

> But no widely available shipping or packaging material can match cardboard’s recyclability, which hovers annually between 90 and 91 percent.

This begs the question: what is cardboard being recycled into?

[fckgw]

More cardboard. The 10% not being recycled still requires a lot of trees.

Anyone who has worked retail and used the baler can attest to the sheer amount of cardboard that comes into a building, gets de-boxed and then goes right back out in the back of a semi-truck trailer. Most of the cardboard recycling isn't being done by consumers, it's done by businesses.

[rsj_hn]

Prior to cardboard, stuff was shipped in wooden crates. So, a big improvement in terms of wood required to ship something.

On the other hand, it was easier to re-use the crates.

On the third hand, the empty wooden crates took up a lot of space to be shipped back, which required a lot more fuel and labor to re-use them rather than recycling the cardboard.

So on net, cardboard is a big positive. We may come up with a replacement for cardboard in the future that would be an even bigger positive.

[lotsofpulp]

> On the third hand, the empty wooden crates took up a lot of space to be shipped back, which required a lot more fuel and labor to re-use them rather than recycling the cardboard.

Wooden crates also have a lot more mass than cardboard, hence would require much more energy to move.

[pfdietz]

Are adhesive labels, tape, staples, etc. effectively separated from cardboard, or do those degrade the value of the recycled material?

[marcosdumay]

From small experiments recycling paper, I'd guess that any kind of plastic or metal is trivial to separate, and any kind of paper gets mixed into the new cardboard. That probably degrades the recycled material, but very likely not enough to be the bottleneck.