16 Aug Cardboard Life Cycle
What is cardboard? If you answered a brown box, you’re only partly correct. There are two
types of cardboard. The first is called boxboard. This a solid sheet used for products like shoe boxes and tablet backings. The gray color indicates that the boxboard has been made of recycled materials. The color comes from combining different types of paper, some of which may have had the ink left on them. The second type is called corrugated cardboard, or just corrugated. It is commonly used to make what most people call “cardboard boxes.” Corrugated is a paper sandwich of linerboard (the two outer layers) and the medium (the ribbed inner layer).
While some corrugated cardboard is recycled at curbside, the bulk of it comes from commercial rather than residential sources. If you’ve every checked the service area of your local supermarket or furniture store, you’ll see the volume of corrugated packing material used by commercial outlets. That’s because corrugated containers are sturdy, strong, and can be custom-made to a particular order.
Like homeowners, stores usually have their garbage hauler or recycling service collect their cardboard. The hauler next sells it to a dealer, who collects and guarantees quantities of a material to end users. In most cases, the end user is a paper mill.
At the mill, the corrugated is pulped and blended with additional pulp from wood chips. Broken, thus shorter and weaker, old fibers are blended with the new pulp to make the medium. Recycled paper fibers and new pulp are blended to make linerboard. Then the medium and the linerboard are shipped to a boxboard plant, where the manufacturing process is finished. The medium is corrugated by specially-geared machines, the linerboards are glued on, and the resulting flat pieces, called mats, are trimmed to size and creased along a pattern of folds. The mats are shipped flat to customers who set them up into boxes. Then the boxes are used to package products for shipping.
For more information on what to do with your waste cardboard please visitEly Enterprises Website or call 216-252-8090.
