Used corrugated has a seasonal rhythm that almost nobody buying it is aware of, because it is invisible from the buyer's side. You place an order, you get a price, the price moves a bit, and you assume that is the market. What is actually happening is two curves — inbound supply and outbound demand — sliding past each other across the year.
The two curves
Inbound supply peaks in January and February. Retailers, distributors and e-commerce operations are clearing the aftermath of the holiday season, and the volume of recovered corrugated arriving at every yard in the country surges. It is the cleanest, most plentiful material of the year.
Outbound demand peaks in August through October, as everybody builds inventory and packaging stock ahead of the fourth quarter. By then the January material is largely sold.
| Period | Inbound supply | Outbound demand | Practical effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan – Feb | Very high | Low | Best availability and price of the year |
| Mar – Apr | High | Moderate | Good availability; grade A plentiful |
| May – Jun | Moderate | Moderate | Balanced; agriculture starts pulling gaylords |
| Jul – Aug | Low | High | Tightening; lead times extend |
| Sep – Oct | Low | Very high | Tightest of the year |
| Nov – Dec | Rising | Falling | Availability recovers, grade quality dips |
Why the November material is different
Volume returns in November but the grade mix shifts noticeably. Peak-season handling is faster and rougher everywhere; boxes come back with more corner damage, more tape residue and more moisture exposure. Our grade A yield typically drops from around 15% to 9% between October and December.
So November is not a repeat of January. It is more material of worse average quality, which is a different proposition entirely.
The agriculture overlay
Gaylords run on a different clock from shippers. Demand for lined bulk bins climbs through May and June as growers prepare for pack-out, spikes hard in August and September, and then a large volume of used harvest bins arrives back at yards in late autumn.
If you are an agricultural buyer, your single biggest lever is committing to a pool in March for an August need. We hold pre-season inventory against committed orders and the price difference versus a September panic buy is substantial.
Nothing in this business rewards planning as reliably as pre-season gaylord commitment.
What to do about it
- Buy your annual baseline requirement in Q1 if you have anywhere to put it. Availability and grade are both at their best.
- If you have no storage, a standing order released from our yard gives you the same economics without the floor space.
- Avoid first-time spot buying in September. It is the one month where you will reliably pay a premium for mediocre material.
- If you are selling to us, late winter is when we are most selective and midsummer is when we are most eager. The spread is real.
- Treat November availability with mild scepticism and insist on grade documentation.
A caution about over-fitting
This is a pattern, not a law. A single large customer entering or leaving a regional market can swamp it entirely, and OCC commodity prices — which set the floor beneath everything — follow their own cycle driven by containerboard demand and export flows. We have had Septembers that behaved like Februaries.
The useful takeaway is not the calendar. It is that there is a calendar at all, and that your fixed monthly purchase order is riding across it blind.
Our pieces are written by the people who do the work rather than by a content agency, which is why they contain more numbers and fewer adjectives than is fashionable. If a figure here does not match your experience, we would genuinely like to hear about it — two of our published coefficients have changed that way.