Tree to Box: The Billion Dollar Cardboard Business

The world runs on cardboard. Produce, snacks, electronics, drinks, merchandise, family items, all the things is shipped in cardboard. Cardboard could be made into totally different properties, strengths, and shapes – all the things from heavy-duty bins that may maintain watermelons or merchandise, trays for recent produce, food-safe bins for pizzas, sweet bins that double as in-store shows, to Amazon bins robust sufficient to outlive the again of a Fedex truck.

Worldwide Paper and WestRock are two largest gamers who’ve taken a lion’s share of the American cardboard market previously decade. The following time you come throughout a cardboard field, take a second to flip it over and search for a brand on the backside, and also you’ll seemingly discover that it got here from 1 of those 2 corporations.

Worldwide Paper and WestRock are large enterprise empires hidden in plain sight whose merchandise not solely allow American commerce, but additionally prolong into the political panorama and form overseas international locations. On this episode, we’ll cowl the enterprise of cardboard, the way it’s made, and the contrasting methods of those 2 cardboard giants.

0:00 The World Runs on Cardboard Bins
1:36 The Science Behind the Materials
3:40 How Cardboard is Engineered
5:07 Forests as Pure Assets
6:29 Provide Chain of Uncooked Supplies to Completed Items
8:05 How Cardboard is Offered
9:28 Tree to Field Vertical Integration
11:50 The Gradual King
14:32 The Secrets and techniques of Recycling Paper
15:50 Shaping Brazil & Russia
18:02 The Nimble Inheritor
20:02 Provide Chain & Product Differentiation