Take a look at this. I wonder what process they use to make the pallets strong enough. If only they could ramp up their sales and production fast enough to cause a significant increase in demand for cardboard, thus freeing up the market and allowing us to ship more of the cardboard that has been accumulating in our yards. For more information about the company and their pallets, go here.

RecycleBill stumbled upon a company that allows people to buy and sell used cardboard boxes. So, before they get landfilled or recycled, the boxes actually get used over and over again until they run out of life. If the site really works as planned, it would sure help with the overabundance of OCC sitting in many a recycling yard with nowhere to go. At least it would help for the overabundance to not become such a big thing in the future because that excess would be trading on that site instead of filling up recycling centers.

In case you haven’t noticed, scrap prices of every material are down dramatically. The economic slowdown has reduced demand of pretty much every single scrap commodity. That, of course, is starting to impact recycling rates on some items. One in particular is paper and cardboard products.

International Paper just recently had to shut down one of its paper machines that makes cardboard due to decreased demand. This has in turn reduced the price on recycled paper products and recycling yards will now find it harder to secure a buyer for those products and lowers the price they pay for the material. All of this results in less recycling of paper.

We seem to become more and more aware of things we used to take for granted the longer the economy continues to struggle. Hopefully we won’t see any permanent reduction in recycling rates.