Zero-waste and 100%-diversion claims have become standard in packaging and waste services marketing. Some are honest. Most are arithmetic performed on a carefully chosen denominator. Here is how to tell which one you are being sold.
The three ways a 100% claim is usually constructed
- Excluding residuals from the denominator. 'We divert 100% of divertible material' is technically true and completely vacuous.
- Counting waste-to-energy as diversion. Burning material is better than landfilling it, but calling incineration recycling is a definitional stretch that most honest frameworks reject.
- Measuring at the gate rather than at the end. If you hand material to a broker and count it as diverted, you have measured a transfer, not an outcome.
The test question
Ask what happens to wax-coated produce board.
Wax-coated corrugated — the kind used for produce, where moisture resistance matters — cannot go into a standard OCC stream. Wax does not pulp and does not screen out cleanly; it redeposits on mill equipment and on the finished sheet. There are a small number of specialist outlets and they are not nationally available.
Anyone claiming 100% diversion who cannot immediately name their wax outlet is either not handling any, or not telling you the truth about where it goes.
Our own numbers, including the awkward one
We publish a diversion figure of 94% of inbound reused or recycled. That means 6% of what arrives here is residual. Here is what the 6% is.
| Material | Share of inbound | Why it is residual |
|---|---|---|
| Wax-coated board | 2.4% | No viable regional outlet |
| Food-contaminated board | 1.6% | Grease and organics cannot be separated economically |
| Heavily laminated / foil-faced | 1.1% | Mixed material, not separable |
| Plastic and film from liners | 0.6% | Handled as film where volume allows; otherwise residual |
| Miscellaneous non-paper | 0.3% | Banding, hardware, the occasional surprise |
We would rather report that than round it away. It also gives customers something actionable: two of those five lines are things a dock can reduce at source, which is a more useful conversation than a congratulatory percentage.
The hierarchy that sits above all of this
A diversion percentage treats reuse and recycling as equivalent, and they are not remotely equivalent.
- Reuse keeps the structure, the scores, the print and the fibre length. About 1.8 kg CO₂e per container cycle.
- Repair then reuse: 2.3 kg.
- Conversion into dunnage or honeycomb panel: 4.1 kg. Destroys the container, keeps the sheet.
- Recycling: 6.4 kg. Destroys the structure and consumes one of the five to seven lives the fibre has.
- Landfill: the fibre and all the embodied work are gone.
A supplier reporting 100% diversion by baling everything is performing worse, environmentally, than one reporting 94% while reusing a large fraction. The headline number inverts the ranking.
What to ask for instead
- Tonnage reused versus tonnage recycled, reported separately. Never a combined diversion figure.
- The residual fraction, stated as a number, with its composition.
- Trips per container, if any reusable programme is involved.
- The emission coefficients behind any carbon claim, so your team can substitute their own.
- Contamination rate over time, including periods when it got worse.
A note on our own 2023
Our contamination rate rose for two consecutive quarters in 2023 after we took on a customer whose waste stream we had badly underestimated. We published it in the same statement as the diversion figures, lost one prospect over it, and fixed the sorting step. A figure you only share when it flatters you is marketing rather than measurement, and we would rather be held to the second standard.
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.