Cardboard Recycling 101

You’ve made your Meliora order with the intent to do your chores and help the environment with our earth friendly products. Thank you for supporting us and congratulations! Did you know that our focus on people- and planet-friendly products also includes what we use to ship the products to your home? It’s true!

Every order we ship to your home is 100% free of plastic packaging. We use cardboard boxes, paper tape, and paper fill inside to keep your products safe in transit. We don’t need to use plastic films or tape to get our products to your home safely, so we don’t use them!

But now you have a cardboard box and paper padding. What are you going to do with it?

When you’re ultimately done with your boxes and paper packaging, it’s important to recycle them. According to cardboardbalers.org, recycling just one ton of cardboard will save 46 gallons of oil, 4000kW of electricity, 6.6 million BTUs of energy, 9 cubic yards of landfill space, 17 trees and 7,000 gallons of water.

If you can’t reuse the box around the home (or to ship that scarf you knitted to grandma), you’ll want to recycle it along with your other paper and cardboard. In the United States, also according to cardboardbalers.org, 850 million tons of cardboard is thrown away annually. That equates to 1 billion trees!

Make sure your cardboard is clean. 

Pizza boxes or a box that has food or grease/oil spilled in/on it need to be composted. Other cardboard that is shiny, like from a six pack, soda box or milk carton, should also be recycled or composted per your local guidelines.

Since we use paper tape at Meliora, you don’t have to worry about taking it off when you go to flatten your boxes. If you want to help the recyclers, you can take the plastic tape off your other boxes, but it isn’t necessary. They’re able to handle this step, too, in most cases.

Heavy packing paper, like what we use to pad our products, can also be reused or recycled. Just fold it up and store it to reuse later, or put it in with your cardboard recycling.

One last thing

When you go to put out the recycling or are taking it to the recycling center, make sure it isn’t raining or that it is protected from the rain. Wet cardboard usually won’t be recycled.

So along with purchasing our planet-friendly products, continue minimizing your carbon footprint by reusing and recycling your cardboard properly, please!