For UK manufacturing businesses, cardboard is often treated as a necessary nuisance, but one that people would rather not deal with if possible. Boxes arrive with components, packaging protects goods when they are being shipped, and production areas inevitably end up with stacks of unwanted cardboard to deal with. Eventually, it gets thrown into a bin or a skip, collected and paid for as waste.
But, what if that cardboard could be turned into something more valuable? For businesses with significant quantities of unwanted cardboard, cardboard balers can completely change the waste management needs. Instead of filling expensive bins with loose packaging, a baler compresses cardboard into dense, manageable balers that can be stored on your business site, or sent to recycling brokers. Depending on the quality, volume, and a few other things, these bales may even be able to generate a rebate for you.
In other words – the size of your cardboard waste matters.
Why Loose Cardboard Costs More Than You Think
Cardboard is a bulky item, and therefore a pretty small amount of material is able to quickly fill up a commercial waste bin as empty boxes have a lot of air inside of them. For a manufacturing site, this creates an annoying cycle of cardboard accumulating, bins filling quickly, collection being arranged, and another collection fee to pay.
If you have employees spending their time breaking down these boxes to fit more in, you’re then going to be paying for them to do this.
Luckily, a baler tackles the problem at the source. Rather than putting loose cardboard into a general waste or recycling bin, employees can feed it to a baler. Hydraulic pressure compresses the material into a dense bale, which is then tied off and moved somewhere that you have designated for storage.
Landfill Alternatives supplies machines capable of producing smaller bales around 50kg, all the way to huge bales of 500kg, or more. Overall, this is a huge difference in the amount of space the same cardboard is going to take up.
From Waste Cost to Potential Revenue
This is where the business case becomes particularly interesting. Once cardboard is compacted into suitable bales, it becomes easier to store, transport, and then handle. Recyclers accept certain grades of baled cardboard, and at sufficient volumes a business may be able to arrange collection through a recycling broker rather than paying for the material to be disposed of as general waste.
The important distinction is that cardboard value isn’t guaranteed. Prices depend on factors including material grade, bale quality, contamination, volume, and marketing conditions. However, producing a consistent, high-quality bale can make cardboard considerably more attractive within the recycling supply chain.
For a business currently paying to have cardboard removed, there are two potential financial improvements that you could see:
- Fewer waste collections
- Possible income stream from the recyclable material
Landfill Alternative notes that baled cardboard can often be collected for free and that higher volumes may generate rebates in some cases.
Choosing The Right Baler for Your Business
Not every manufacturing site produces cardboard in the same way, which is why baler size is going to matter. A smaller manufacturer with steady but relatively modest cardboard volumes may be suitable to a vertical baler. These machines have a compact footprint and can be positioned as close as possible to where cardboard is generated.
High-volume operations on the other hand may benefit from larger vertical machines, horizontal balers or automatic systems. Horizontal balers are designed for higher throughput applications and can accommodate different feeding methods, including things like manual loading, bin tipping, forklifts or conveyor systems.
The objective then isn’t just to buy the biggest machine available. It is to match the equipment to the amount of cardboard produced, available space, handling process, and desired bale size. For businesses investigating cardboard balers for sale, options are available in different sizes, with new and refurbished machines as well as purchase and hire arrangements.
The Bigger Picture
A cardboard baler can also be a critical part of a wider waste management strategy for your business.
Separating cardboard from general waste means recyclable material isn’t unnecessarily sent through the general waste stream. It also reduces the amount of material going into skips and bins, which can then reduce the frequency at which you need collection.
If your business produces plastic film, paper, or other recyclable materials, some baling systems are able to accommodate more waste streams, allowing companies to take a broader approach to waste reduction.
So, for the manufacturing businesses looking at sustainability as well as costs, this can be another reason to examine how packaging waste is currently handled.
Calculate What Your Cardboard Is Really Costing
The first step is always going to be to look at the numbers:
- How many cardboard bins or skips does your business fill each month?
- How frequently are they collected?
- What are you paying for those collections?
- How much staff time goes into handling loose cardboard?
- How much space is being taken up by packaging waste?
Once you’ve considered all of this, you then need to think about what could happen if that cardboard gets compressed into saleable bales instead. Now, it’s true that the answer will be different for every business, which is why Landfill Alternatives offers a free, no obligation on site waste audit to assess cardboard volumes, available space and current disposal arrangements before recommending an appropriate solution.
For some manufacturers, the result could be a tidier site and fewer collections that they need to pay for. For those with higher volume operations, the combination of reduced disposal costs and potential recycling rebates can turn cardboard from an ongoing expense, into a material with measurable value instead.
Sometimes, size really does matter, especially when the size of your cardboard waste is eating into your bottom line. It’s worth doing something about that as soon as yo
