Learning About Industrial Safety Equipment

Help Your Shredder and the Environment by Looking for These Things on Cardboard Boxes

by Jonathan Carroll

Running a factory or other company that receives and uses a lot of cardboard boxes can quickly become tiresome if you let those boxes pile up too much between trips to the recycling yard. One option is to invest in an onsite shredder that can turn old, unusable boxes into a pile of bits that can be recycled, used as filler or padding, or put to some other use. However, in order to keep the shredder working in top condition for a long time, you have to be careful about what goes through it. Cardboard boxes can have a lot of extra substances on and in them that can make a cardboard-box shredder require more maintenance over time. In addition to that, those substances can also ruin any shredded cardboard that you were going to recycle or put to other uses.

Food and Grease

Whether the box contained food that left stains directly on the cardboard, such as grease in pizza boxes, or food was spilled on the box, you should not put greasy or food-stained cardboard through shredders and into recycling or repurposing piles.

  • Bits of grease or food can stick to the parts of the shredder, eventually attracting pests.
  • The grease or food, if mixed in with shredded cardboard headed for recycling, can ruin the slurry created when the recycling company mixes the cardboard with water at the start of the recycling process (thus requiring the recycling company to dump the entire batch of recycling).
  • The grease or food can contaminate the blades of the shredder, allowing the shredder to spread bits of grease or food to additional batches of cardboard.
  • Any shredded cardboard that is being used as filler or for other purposes can attract pests if it contains those bits of food or grease.

Inspect boxes before passing them through the shredder, and tear out parts that appear to be contaminated with food or grease. Throw those parts out.

Adhesive

Like grease, adhesive can ruin a batch of recycling and cause your shredder to need more maintenance -- the adhesive forms these little sticky specks that essentially gum up the works in both cases. The adhesive can come from labels, tape, stamps, and other sticky-backed items. There are companies now that make labels with recycling-friendly adhesive, but if you're not sure if the labels on your boxes use that adhesive, remove the labels before putting the boxes through the shredder.

Thick Staples

Industrial-strength shredders aren't really going to be stopped by office-style thin staples, but the thicker brackets and staples used on many boxes can dull or jam shredder blades. Plus, if you're planning to use the shredded cardboard for purposes like filling, you'll now have a bunch of metal shards to deal with. Remove staples before sending the boxes through the machine.

Talk to the shredding company manufacturers and sellers that you can find about other items that should not go through the shredder. Soon you'll learn to spot these items quickly so you can remove them, thus keeping the shredder in better shape in the long run and allowing that shredded cardboard to go on to things greater than the trash heap.

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