We are asked for a carbon figure roughly once a week, usually for a customer's Scope 3 report. Most suppliers hand over a single impressive number with no workings. We would rather show the arithmetic and let you adjust it.
The baseline: one new triple-wall gaylord
A 48 × 40 × 36 triple-wall gaylord weighs approximately 18.5 lb (8.4 kg) of corrugated board. Published life-cycle figures for virgin-content corrugated cluster around 1.1 – 1.6 kg CO₂e per kg of board, cradle to gate, including pulping, forming, converting and inbound freight. We use 1.3 as a mid estimate.
That gives roughly 10.9 kg CO₂e embodied in a new gaylord before it has carried anything.
The reuse alternative
Putting an existing gaylord back into service costs: collection freight (shared with other loads), grading labour, occasional repair board, and outbound freight. Our own measured figure, allocated across a full trailer of 400 knocked-down boxes, is 1.4 – 2.1 kg CO₂e per container cycle. We publish 1.8.
So, per trip
- New container, single use: ~10.9 kg CO₂e per trip.
- New container, amortised over 9 trips: ~1.2 kg + 1.8 kg handling = ~3.0 kg per trip.
- Reconditioned container entering its second life: ~1.8 kg CO₂e per trip.
- Net avoidance versus single-use: roughly 9.1 kg CO₂e per container, per trip.
What we deliberately exclude
End-of-life credit for recycling. Carbon stored in the fibre. Avoided landfill methane. All three would make our number look better and all three are contested. We leave them out and still arrive at a strong figure.
The fibre argument
There is a second, less-discussed benefit. Every reuse cycle keeps fibre long. Corrugated can be recycled roughly five to seven times before the fibres become too short to form a strong sheet. Reuse postpones each recycling event, which means the same tree yields more total service life. Reuse is not an alternative to recycling; it is a multiplier on it.
Use our numbers, but check them
We will send the underlying spreadsheet to any customer who asks, including the freight allocation model. If you think an assumption is wrong, tell us — we have changed it twice already because customers pushed back with better data.
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.