These days almost every industry uses cardboard boxes for shipping their products to various customers all over the world. Therefore, it is very common to see cardboard boxes of different sizes and shapes are dumped in the garbage areas. Also, in many industries you can find plenty of cardboard boxes lying as a waste. According to environment protection agency, cardboard boxes are the largest component in any municipal waste collection.
People who are responsible for recycling usually collect corrugated boxes separately and they also keep it separated from other paper wastes. That is because these cardboard boxes do not go to paper mills for recycling.
Following are few ways the cardboard boxes are recycled
-
By making pulp
All the cardboard wastes collected are taken to recycling station where they are filled with water and agitated at higher temperature till they take the form of fiber slurry.
-
Removal of contaminant
There is chain of steps where various contaminants are separated from the slurry. Contaminants can be strings, tapes, metals, plastics which are separated from the slurry by using different methods at different stages.
-
Making papers
The pulp that has been cleaned from above process are transferred to paper machine. Here the water content from the pulp is removed and drained out and passes through moving screen to form fiber mat. The mats are transferred between the rollers which again squeezes out remaining water and then allowed to pass through heated cylinders. It is then dried to form large spools. These spools are rolled and shipped to manufacturers like box packaging by Belley who further processes them.
-
Making new boxes
Manufacturers create flat liner sheets out of these recycled materials and also form corrugated ridged between these sheets in order use them to make corrugated boxes. Theoretically 100 per cent material should be from recycled material for producing new boxes but in reality only35 to 40 per cent materials only come from recycles cardboards while rest comes from fresh raw materials.
Therefore, it is necessary that all industrial wastes and also waste material received from general public that contains cardboard boxes must be sent to local recycling center. There should be proper mechanism developed so that cardboard waste that are of no use should not remain dumped but should be carried to recycle center only then we will be in a position to recycle 100 per cent waste cardboard materials into new corrugated board boxes for future use.
