How The World's Largest Paper Company Makes 1/3 of Cardboard Boxes In America | World Wide Waste

this huge pile of pine trees will turn into

cardboard

. The packaging of a single box can contain material from thousands of trees and pass through the hands of hundreds of workers. They're like it's just a box. I say no, it's not much. enter it, it has used a

cardboard

box in the U.S. Today, there is a one in three chance that International Paper has made it the

largest

paper

company

in the

world

. Cardboard is essential for countless industries protecting items as they move on trucks and ships, and the good news is. is that it is one of the most recycled materials in the

world

, but if a large amount of it is reused, why do we still have to cut down millions of trees?

Is it possible to make environmentally friendly cardboard? This mill in Georgia is just one of hundreds of facilities operated by International Paper, running 24/7 to meet the demand of grocery stores shopping online and more, but no one in this industry would call its product cardboard. Why don't you like to use the word cardboard because it's not cardboard? Experts call it corrugated cardboard. a corrugated layer sandwiched between two flat outer sheets, but yes, most people call it cardboard and it starts with live trees. Forester Alex Singleton walked us through an area whose trees were sold to International Paper two years ago and have since been replanted with longleaf pines, but it will still take decades for the new crop to mature for many foresters, we only see one harvested site Once during our careers from this stage until probably around 30 years after harvest, the owners make money by selling their trees to different industries, turning them into things like wooden telephone poles and of course

paper

.

The idea is to turn forests into an investment so that more people plant and maintain them without young, healthy forests. Our industry could not succeed. I don't see logging or logging as a negative thing, it's just the beginning of a process, but critics say that replanting trees is not the same as letting them grow. This is one of the most industrial and most logged forests on the planet. The southern US sometimes called America's timber basket is home to two percent of the world's forested land and yet produces. almost 20 percent of our pulp and paper products, which means it is highly productive or highly exploited depending on who you ask.

On a normal day, about 300 truckloads of freshly cut trees arrive at this mill. The first stop is The Wood Yard, some of the trees are placed in these huge piles which ensure that the mill can sustain operations 24 hours a day. They come from farms and forests within a 120-mile radius. A sprinkler keeps them moist to keep them cool and reduce the risk of fire. A crane collects the trees. the pile and drops them into a machine that removes the bark with a debarking drum you are removing the bark, you know, I tell the kids similar to a potato peeler, this process creates tons of leftover bark that will be burned for energy to We have the stripped logs travel through a shredder and by stacking them here in that wood pile we can preserve up to about 100,000 tons of chips.

It will only take the mill about 10 days to cross this mountain. A conveyor belt feeds the next pulping step. Long, fibrous fibers held together by a natural glue-like material called lignin. Paper makers want the fibers but not the glue, so they use steam and chemicals to dissolve it. The reaction can create a gas that smells like sulfur if you've ever noticed a rotten smell. As you drive by a paper plant, that's probably why International Paper says its plants are built to capture many of those gases, which reduces the smell. The fibers are covered in a toxic mix of chemicals and tree debris, so they must be cleaned.

That liquor that is. It is washed and evaporated and consolidated and goes into what we call a recovery boiler; In other words, the plant burns that sticky debris creating steam and chemicals that can return to the process and save energy. We are actually plants within a plant, so we have our own chemical plant, our own power plant, in fact this mill produces about 75 percent of its own energy on site. IP also burns less coal than before, helping to reduce factory emissions, but the trees contain a lot of carbon and the

company

's own sustainability report says the carbon released by processing the trees was more than double the emissions coming from it. from burning fossil fuels in 2022 before the Pope becomes paper workers add used cardboard to the mix old packaging gets a new start in this warehouse the

boxes

we use here at The recycling plant comes from retailers and stores of local groceries within a radius of up to 300 miles from the mill.

Katie Freeze has worked at this recycling mill for three years and says people still have a lot of misconceptions about what our process is designed to handle. Things like grease and duct tape just recycle any corrugated cardboard box you have, whether it has duct tape or food on it, it can be used to make paper again and then you can recycle a pizza box every day. This mill recycles 500 tons of used cardboard, each ton saves. trees energy and water saving water is key because almost every step of paper manufacturing uses a lot of it. Used cardboard is also pulped using water and chemicals and then mixed with fresh fibers.

Workers simply call this huge contraption the machine. of paper presses the pulp to flatten and squeeze it then sends the mixture through a series of dryers heated to over 200 degrees Fahrenheit as it passes through the machine, the sheet becomes drier and drier and after all, still only you have any paper left to turn into corrugated, package the rolls and head to a box plant like this one in illinois here flexible paper is turned into strong

boxes

the heartbeat of the plant is the corrugator the corrugator is how the middle layer of packaging You get that distinctive wavy shape.

The waves are actually called flutes and they are what give this type of packaging its strength. Different types of flutes, the smaller ones print better, not as good for stacking strength and the larger ones don't print as well, but are better for string stacking. This plant can manufacture boxes in over 1.6 million different designs, the smallest box I have ever made was the size of a ring box or the

largest

box I have ever made at one of my facilities was for a washing machine, after gluing the layers, finishing touches include printing graphics and cutting the sheets into their final shapes to save space most boxes are sent to customers flat and any offcuts or scrap pieces can be recycled back into the process in In the U.S., more than 70 percent of used cardboard is recycled, which is much higher than rates for aluminum, glass, or plastic before paper.

It's easy to recycle because the supply chain supports it, so it has value. It also helps that nearly 80 percent of Americans can recycle using curbside bins. So why does the industry still use so many trees? Part of it is that old cardboard. cannot be recycled indefinitely, the EPA says it can only go through the process about seven times each time it is pulped and mixed, the long, strong pine fibers become a little shorter and weaker, and eventually the pieces of Degraded paper simply passes through the meshes and is left out of the process, so recycling is very important, but even if one hundred percent of the boxes were reused, making new ones would mean cutting down trees.

Some experts say the big question is whether the industry manages forests responsibly. International Paper sources more than 90 percent of its production. tree fiber in the southern US, where the vast majority of forests are on private property, what we do is provide a viable market for that owner's trees, so that they have the income necessary to be able to pay for the reforestation that is carried out. on their land Foresters and paper companies argue that without such a market people could simply sell their land, potentially losing forests forever to agricultural parking or other uses. Data from the University of Maryland shows that tree cover in the US today is about the same as it was in 2000.

To me, as a forester, it must mean we're doing our job right. You know that we are taking care of the environment, that we are promoting forest growth, but measuring forest area is complicated to begin with, not everyone agrees. What is a forest? Pine plantations are not forests. They are tree farms that lack diversity, structural diversity, biological diversity. Many of these species depend on a non-profit environmental organization called The Dogwood Alliance. He says tree farms have been replacing natural forests. That could have a global impact. Some experts estimate that natural forests are 40 times better than plantations at storing carbon, making them crucial to curbing climate change.

Forests also have many other benefits, such as filtering or drinking water and reducing erosion. Certain forestry techniques such as leaving some large trees can help planted forests retain those benefits. I think there are ways to manage forests sustainably without removing the largest trees and completely destroying the structural complexity of a forest, but that requires very skilled specific forestry and that is not always what ultimately happens. The world uses a huge amount of paper that has to come from somewhere. You may see certifications stamped on boxes that are supposed to indicate that they are made from trees that were sustainably harvested.

International Paper says it used more than 30 percent of the fibers in 2022. It came from forests with one of those certifications. I think there is a way for industry and conservation to coexist in the southern forests, but there has to be an effort to good faith everywhere