Photo illustration by Todd St. John
We have barely scratched the surface on the subject of the shipping implications of online retailing's growing share of the economy. Until now, no attention to the boxes, specifically. Cardboard is an increasing part of the lives of most of us living in digital economies, so thanks to Matthew Shaer for letting us know more about it:
Where Does All the Cardboard Come From? I Had to Know.
Entire forests and enormous factories running 24/7 can barely keep up with demand. This is how the cardboard economy works.
Stacks of unprinted, uncut cardboard at the International Paper factory in Lithonia, Ga. Christopher Payne for The New York Times
Before it was the cardboard on your doorstep, it was coarse brown paper, and before it was paper, it was a river of hot pulp, and before it was a river, it was a tree. Probably a Pinus taeda, or loblolly pine, a slender conifer native to the Southeastern United States. "The wonderful thing about the loblolly," a forester named Alex Singleton told me this spring, peering out over the fringes of a tree farm in West Georgia, "is that it grows fast and grows pretty much anywhere, including swamps" — hence the non-Latin name for the tree, which comes from an antiquated term for mud pit. "See those oaks over there?" Singleton went on. "Oaks are hardwood, with short fibers. Fine for paper. Book pages. But not fine for packaging, because for packaging, you need the long fibers. A pine will give you that. An oak won't."
A timber farm in Rome, Ga., that supplies I.P. Christopher Payne for The New York Times
Singleton, who is 54, with a shaved head and graying beard, has spent the past few years as a fiber-supply manager for International Paper, or I.P., a packaging concern headquartered in Memphis. Read more of this post
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