Where Have All The Boxes Gone?

This week, whilst taking my morning scroll through my news app, I stumbled across an article about a shortage of cardboard. A large cardboard recycling plant has highlighted this shortage as the reason some high supermarkets are having to resort back to using the dreaded plastic for their packaging. It claims that because we are all doing more shopping online cardboard boxes are becoming terminal. Before the explosion of online shopping we used to visit high street stores and supermarkets for our goods. Many of these goods had been delivered from the wholesaler in cardboard packaging which the store would then recycle through contracted recycling systems.  It was then used to make more cardboard boxes, which in turn were used to deliver goods and so the cycle continued. Now, since we are doing more and more of our purchasing online, from groceries to luxury items, online stores have increased their demand for cardboard packaging to deliver our goods safely, and no matter how hard we try with our recycling efforts much of that cardboard ends up in landfill rather than back at the recycling plant. This led me to a few more interesting articles all highlighting the same issue and that the knock on effect of the terminal box is now hitting smaller online retailers as well. All of which got me to thinking. 

Ever since the advent of online shopping I have been a fervent supporter; any excuse not to have to go out shopping is a good one; but I’ve never really considered where the cardboard boxes my online purchases are packed in came from. It is the thing I eagerly wrestle open to remove the contents before discarding it without a thought, taking it for granted because everything comes in a cardboard box. I have never given a second thought to the possibility that we would ever run out of cardboard boxes. But, with the pandemic adding to the strain, that is what seems to be happening. Over the last few years there has been an increasingly steady stream of goods through my front door, all packaged in cardboard boxes. Indeed, most of my Christmas shopping is done online so; given the size of my family; that stream becomes a flood. There are times when we have a mountain of boxes to dispose of, which resides in the conservatory until one or the other of us finally shreds them into manageable pieces, some of which end up in the recycling bin. One of our problems with recycling is that we live in a Metropolitan Borough with a less than exemplary recycling ethic; our local council even delivered a flyer instructing us that most of what we were currently recycling now has to go in with our household waste, where it all ends up in landfill. We also discovered, a while back, that our recycled waste also goes to landfill, which begs the question, why bother to separate at all? The local “recycling” centres don’t help either as there are limits on what they will accept, so it seems we can’t recycle even if we want to. Adding to that insult is the huge, and I mean huge, new recycling and incineration plant less than a mile away, serving two of our neighbouring metropolitan boroughs but which, due to politics I presume, ours is unable to use. Not all of our cardboard goes into the bin, however. We have an allotment and as cardboard is one of the ingredients in making a good compost, much of our cardboard waste ends up being used for this purpose, which doesn’t help the cardboard box industry since the compost heap, like landfill, is where it ends it’s life.

Which brings me neatly back to the problem of the terminal boxes. Since these articles highlighted the big online shopping companies as the cause I wondered why they hadn’t come up with a solution. I mean, all these companies are making billions of pounds every second of every day so why not invest in an effective recycling project; such as teaming up with the supermarkets and recycling plants, like the one in the article, and provide some way for us online shoppers to ensure that instead of throwing away all that cardboard we can send it to where it can be properly recycled. Despite the rise in online shopping most of us still visit our local supermarket on a regular basis so why not use them to solve the problem. For decades now, collection points for glass, paper, clothing, plastic, aluminium and cardboard have become ubiquitous in supermarket car parks; many of us are already happy to take our recycling along with us each time we go shopping; but most are maintained by the local council, who are also responsible for any collections. Here, again, the pandemic has had an effect with councils reducing or stopping collections during lockdowns. On further reading I found that many supermarkets have realised the shortcomings of roadside recycling and are trying to address the issue by making their own private arrangements for the collection of recyclables. With this in mind my thought is that since many supermarkets already have a recycling system in place for cardboard waste it should be a no brainer for the online shopping companies; who are now, apparently, the chief culprits for gobbling up all the cardboard; to share the cost of maintaining public cardboard waste collection points at all supermarkets and ensuring regular collections take place to get that cardboard back into circulation.