I don’t go around checking trash every day, but lately I have noticed that there appear to be more and more cardboard boxes ending up in the big green dumpsters. They seem to be patiently waiting for a ride to the landfill. The problem there is that they are “space hogs”. No, I am not saying we have pigs from Mars in our dumpsters, only that empty cardboard containers take up a lot of room, and there might be another option to help out. I don’t know exactly what to make of it, but I guess this is happening because more and more folks are shopping online and having their packages delivered to the front door in cardboard packaging by UPS, FedEx, US Postal Service and others. We like that. It’s convenient But the result is that we all put more cardboard into our residential garbage carts which fills them up faster, which fills up the big green dumpsters faster and the trash trucks faster, which then takes up more space in the landfill, which is also filling up, and the price to dump it there also goes up. So, you say, “All of this is very interesting, but what is the solution to the space hogs problem?” The bottom line and most important part of this story is that all of this cardboard that is not being recycled winds up every day going to some distant landfill and costs you and me more and more money.
Several years ago, the City of Swainsboro operated a recycling center to collect cardboard, bale it up and sell it to recyclers. That kept cardboard out of the landfill and worked fine for quite a while until the price of cardboard dropped so low that the recyclers no longer wanted to buy reclaimed cardboard. The city had to suspend recycling operations until prices came back up. Now, four years later, that may have happened. With the amount of E-commerce that is going on today, there may once again be a market for collecting and selling increased amounts of discarded or used cardboard. There may also be an opportunity to resume recycling of other materials like plastic, metal and glass and participate in environmental projects with groups like Keep Emanuel Beautiful, various school organizations, and different civic clubs.
From all forecasts, the amount of residential cardboard used in wholesale and retail sales will increase two percent a year through 2030. Amazon, Ebay and other online sellers expect their business to continue to increase at that same rate, if not more. If those numbers hold true, it may very well be that the resumption of recycling operations for the City of Swainsboro would once again make sense and be in everyone’s interest. Judging from the trips that the UPS and FedEx trucks make to all our neighborhoods, cardboard just might be ready to make a big comeback.
