Paper & Cardboard Recycling

Paper Recycling paper is the process of taking used paper products and creating new paper products from them. There are 3 types of paper material that can be used to produce recycled paper products; mill broke, pre-consumer and post-consumer. At our facility we sort a post consumer mixed paper product which is sold to paper mills.

Cardboard boxes are known to recyclers as “old corrugated containers” or “OCC.” They are made from two brown linerboard facings with a fluted or corrugated paper layer between them. Other boxes, including cereal boxes, shoe boxes, and tissue boxes have a gray liner and are thinner than corrugated containers. These are known as chipboard or paperboard. Our facility also recycles quite a bit of cardboard which is also sold to paper mills.

Forests are being cut and trees are being dropped at an unimaginable rate of 100 acres per minute. All this to produce paper which is normally used and disposed without much thought. A plant takes a minimum of 15 to 20 years to grow into a tree, but takes less than ten minutes to be cut down, and on an average one tree can yield about 700 paper grocery bags, which will be consumed in less than an hour by a supermarket!

For every ton of paper that is recycled, the following are saved:

• 17 trees
• 275 pounds of sulfur
• 350 pounds of limestone
• 9,000 pounds of steam
• 60,000 gallons of water
• 225 kilowatt hours
• 3.3 cubic yards of landfill space