For the first eleven years of this business we sold a lot of used corrugated by the ton. It is how the recycling trade prices things, the scales were already there, and customers understood it. In 2019 we stopped, and the transition was more painful than we expected.
What weight-based pricing rewards
Think about what you are optimising for if you are paid by the ton. Heavier board earns more. Wet board earns more. Triple wall earns more per unit than single wall even when the single-wall box is more useful to the customer. And sorting, which is the actual labour, earns nothing at all.
Now think about it from the buyer's side. You pay for weight and you receive utility. Those are different things, and the gap between them is where every argument in this trade lives.
| Delivery | Weight | Usable boxes | Sizes | Buyer's actual cost per usable box |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Matched grade-B 18" cubes | 1 ton | 1,480 | 1 | Baseline |
| Mixed sizes, mixed grades | 1 ton | 1,350 | 9 | +38% after their own sorting |
| Same mixed load, damp | 1 ton | 1,180 | 9 | +71% |
Same tonnage. Same invoice. Wildly different value. And nothing in a weight-based price distinguishes them, which means the supplier has no incentive to deliver the first one.
The moisture problem specifically
This is the part that made the decision for us. Corrugated picks up and sheds moisture readily — the swing between a dry warehouse and a damp one can be several percent of total mass. Under weight-based pricing, that swing is free revenue for whoever is selling.
We are not accusing anybody of hosing down pallets. We are saying that an incentive structure that makes wet board more profitable than dry board is a bad structure, and that you do not need bad actors for a bad structure to produce bad outcomes. Storage practices drift. Covered inbound stops feeling urgent.
If your pricing rewards water, you will eventually find yourself selling water.
What we moved to
Piece count, by named size and named grade. Every quote states dimensions, style, wall construction, grade from our published scale, and a count that is a count rather than an estimate. Bundled in twenty-fives, banded, with the grade and size on a band tag.
It is more work for us. Counting and bundling 2,000 boxes is genuinely slower than running a pallet over a scale. We think it is the work, though — the sorting is the product, and pricing by weight hid that from everybody including ourselves.
What it cost us
We lost four accounts in the first six months. Three of them were buying on price per ton and our per-piece equivalent looked worse on a spreadsheet, because we were no longer selling them the moisture and the oddments. One came back within a year.
We also had to rebuild our own internal costing from scratch. Under weight pricing we genuinely did not know what the sorting step cost us; we had never needed to. The first time we measured it properly it was about four times what anybody had guessed, which explained several years of thin margins on mixed loads.
Where we still use weight
Two places, both honest ones.
- Baled OCC. It is a fibre commodity sold to mills by the ton, and weight is the correct unit. We publish the moisture reading alongside it.
- Buying from you, when you prefer it. Some docks have a scale and no way to count. We will quote on a weigh ticket or on a piece count, agreed in advance — your choice, not ours, and the choice is made before the trailer arrives.
What to ask your current supplier
If you buy used corrugated by the ton, ask for a quote per piece by size and grade for comparison. A supplier who can produce that is grading. One who cannot is selling you a heap and letting you discover its composition at your own dock.
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.