Walk into the back of almost any retail unit, warehouse, or distribution centre and you’ll find the same thing: stacks of flattened boxes, overflowing skips, and staff spending time they don’t have breaking down packaging by hand. Cardboard has always been part of doing business. What’s changing is how seriously companies are taking the cost of getting rid of it.
Across the US, businesses are starting to treat cardboard not as something to dispose of, but as a material with measurable value. The shift is part of a broader move toward circular economy thinking, where waste becomes a resource rather than a liability.
The Numbers Behind the Waste
US businesses generate millions of tonnes of cardboard waste every year. For many, the response has been reactive: book a dumpster, call a waste collector, repeat. But that approach adds up. Collection fees, labour costs, and the sheer space that loose cardboard takes up all eat into margins that are already under pressure.
Smaller retailers often feel this most acutely. A busy week of deliveries can leave a stockroom unusable. Supermarkets, garden centres, manufacturers, and fulfilment operations face the same challenge at a larger scale.
From Stockroom Chaos to Baled and Ready
Investing in a cardboard baler changes the equation significantly. These machines compress loose cardboard into dense, uniform bales that are far easier to store and transport. Instead of filling a dumpster with lightweight boxes, businesses accumulate compact bales that recyclers actually want to buy.
What That Looks Like in Practice
A retailer that previously scheduled multiple weekly pickups can often cut that to one, or even sell baled material directly to a recycler for additional revenue. The reduction in labour is also real: feeding a baler takes less time than manually breaking down and hauling cardboard to an outdoor container.
Miltek USA offers a range of baling equipment scaled to different business sizes, from smaller vertical balers suited to single-location retailers to high-capacity horizontal models built for larger operations running continuous output.
The Recycling Reality
Cardboard is one of the most recycled materials in the country, but the numbers only hold up when businesses handle it properly at the source. According to the American Forest & Paper Association, over 33 million tons of cardboard were recycled in the US in 2024, with recycling rates sitting between 69% and 74%. That still leaves a significant volume unrecovered, and much of that gap comes down to how commercial cardboard is collected and prepared. Loose, contaminated material gets sorted out before it ever reaches a mill. Baled cardboard arrives clean and ready to process, which is what makes it worth something to recyclers.
Making the Business Case
The conversation around sustainability in retail often focuses on packaging design or supplier choices, and those matter. But how a business handles the cardboard that’s already arriving through its back door is just as important, and it’s a problem that has a practical, cost-effective solution available right now.
