More than ever, we are shopping with a scroll and a click online instead of in our local brick-and-mortar stores. Lucrative same-day shipping deals and the convenience of shopping from home have propelled the growth of e-commerce: up nearly 25 percent last year, according to an analysis by Slice Intelligence. But our online cravings have cardboard consequences. From boots to bananas, meal kits to makeup, we receive so many packages it’s actually changing the very color of material collected at our recycling facilities.
“It used to be grayish, like the color of newspapers and magazines. And now it’s more brown or cardboard in color, from all these boxes,” said spokesman Robert Reed from San Francisco’s recycling hauler, Recology.
“People are ordering a lot more things online, and they arrive in small- and medium-sized cardboard boxes, and so you can see it right here,” Reed told NBC’s Jo Ling Kent, standing beside the plant’s massive pile of cardboard, hard plastics, paper, and bottles.
Every day, Recology collects approximately 625 tons of recyclables, including more than 100 tons of cardboard at their “Recycle Central” plant on San Francisco’s Pier 96.
And instead of that cardboard coming from retail and grocery stores, increasingly the boom of brown boxes comes from apartment buildings and homes.
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