Corrugated boxes are made with a mixture of new wood fibers taken from sustainably managed forests, and “old” fibers extracted from used boxes, collected from end users through a highly effective recycling infrastructure. (There’s even a term for those recovered boxes: they’re called “old corrugated containers,” or OCC.) In fact, on average corrugated boxes contain 52% OCC.
The beauty of this balanced approach is that the OCC finds new life when it is used to manufacture new boxes – again and again – so not only are corrugated boxes recovered through successful recycling programs, they are actually used to make new products.
As a result, millions of tons of corrugated are kept out of landfills and instead are put to use in an open-loop infrastructure.
The market for OCC is tremendous because the fiber is needed for the corrugated industry to continue making new boxes. That is in stark contrast to much weaker markets for other recovered materials, like plastics.
New and recovered fibers
Coming from tree farms and OCC – are both essential to the manufacture of corrugated boxes. We need the recycled fiber to complement what comes from trees in order to keep those forests growing so we don’t deplete the forestland that supports land, air and wildlife conservation.
And we need the new fiber to create products that are strong enough to handle their intended purpose – protecting the products that are shipped in corrugated boxes. As a matter of fact, a steady supply of fiber from both sources is needed. Neither source alone supplies enough material to support the continuous production required by industry to keep economies alive.
