Twelve questions, answered properly.

A gaylord is a large, usually triple-wall corrugated bulk container sized to sit on a standard 48" × 40" GMA pallet. The name comes from the Gaylord Container Corporation, which popularised them — it is a brand name that became a generic term, like dumpster. Typical capacity is 1,800 – 2,200 lb and around 40 cubic feet.

Both, and we are explicit about which. Grade A and B boxes are used as-is after inspection. Reconditioned boxes have had flaps spliced, panels patched or scores rebuilt at our bench, and are re-graded afterwards. Every quote states which you are getting.

One pallet for gaylords (typically 20 – 24 knocked-down boxes). For RSC shippers, 250 boxes or a mixed pallet. Below that we will usually point you to a local supplier rather than charge you freight that makes no sense.

Grade, size run, volume and lane. A matched run of 2,000 grade-B 18" cubes prices very differently from 2,000 mixed boxes of random sizes, because sorting is the expensive part. We quote delivered, with the freight shown separately.

Yes — clean used corrugated and gaylords. Send a photograph of the stack and a rough count. We price by grade and volume, bring our own trailer, and pay on pickup or net-7. We will also tell you honestly when baling will pay you more than resale.

Routinely, to all fifty states. Our core freight lanes cover the Midwest and Mid-South within a day's drive of St. Louis, and we ship full truckloads nationwide. See the locations pages for zone, transit time and mode by state.

Direct food contact, no — not from a used container, and no certificate changes that. But lined used gaylords are used widely in produce and agriculture, with an FDA-compliant poly or foil liner between product and board. We supply the liners and the supplier letters of guarantee.

There is a hierarchy: repair, then dunnage, then honeycomb panel, then upcycled goods, then mill-spec baled OCC. Only wax-coated and contaminated board becomes genuine residual, and we report that fraction rather than hiding it.

Our marked-container data gives a median of nine round trips for triple-wall gaylords, with a top decile of fourteen. The limiting factor is almost always handling, not board quality. We wrote this up in detail on the blog.

We can blank out existing print and apply a single-colour mark on recovered board. For multi-colour brand work, a new box with high recycled content is usually the better answer, and we will say so.

Yes. Monthly or quarterly statements covering tonnage reused, tonnage recycled, landfill avoided and estimated CO₂e avoided, with our assumptions attached so your team can audit them.

Everything we do involves dimensions, grades and counts, and those get mangled over the phone. Email and the form give us the detail we need to quote accurately the first time, and give you a written record. We reply within one business day.

They measure different things. Mullen is a bursting test in pounds per square inch and predicts puncture resistance. ECT is an edge crush test in pounds per linear inch and predicts stacking strength. In a palletised supply chain ECT is almost always the number that matters. Conversion tables between them are rules of thumb, not physics.

No. The Box Maker's Certificate describes the board as it left the converter. A used container has been loaded, stacked, trucked and cycled through humidity changes; the flutes have taken a set and the scores have softened. We grade on observed condition instead and say so on every quote.

Length × width × height, always inside dimensions. Length is the longer side of the open face, width the shorter, and height is measured down from the open face. Outside dimensions add roughly 1/8" per wall for single, 5/16" for double and 5/8" for triple — on every axis, both sides.

Knocked down means shipped flat. A flat 48 × 40 × 36 gaylord occupies about 4.7 cubic feet against 40 erected, so a trailer carries 534 instead of 62. Unless your receiving dock genuinely cannot erect a box, knocked down wins by a margin nothing else on the invoice can close.

Yes, and we push them harder than most suppliers because they are the cheapest life extension available. A separate telescoping cap adds two to three trips to a container on our own marked-container data.

Old Corrugated Containers — the recycling commodity grade for used cardboard. Mill grades #11 and #12 under the ISRI specification are the usual targets. #12 is double-sorted and cleaner, and carries a premium.

Within one business day, every business day. Enquiries go to a grader on the floor rather than to a general inbox, so the reply usually contains an actual number rather than a request for a call.

Yes. Monday to Thursday, 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM Central, at 9869 Meeks Blvd. Bring safety shoes. We would much rather you looked at the grading stations yourself than took our word for the scale.

Yes — collection, grading, reconditioning, storage, re-issue and quarterly reporting under one contract. Your containers stay yours; we just keep them circulating. The metric we report on is trips per container per year.

Peak weekly demand multiplied by cycle time in weeks, plus 20% slack. Undersized pools generate emergency purchases of new containers, which is how a reuse programme ends up buying virgin board.

Sales: net-30 on approved accounts, otherwise payment before dispatch. Purchases from you: on pickup or net-7, agreed before collection. We do not do 'we will tell you what it made at the mill'.

Up to 5% we credit on your word, without inspection. Above that we investigate, which may include collecting the pallet. Arguing about twelve boxes costs more than twelve boxes.

Sometimes, but ask what grade they named first. 'Used' on its own covers everything from a box that shipped once to one that has been rained on for a winter, and a price without a named grade is not a quote.

No. We cannot accept containers carrying hazardous-material markings, and we will not remove them. It is a regulatory matter rather than a judgement call.

Stock sizes ship from inventory. Custom dies run 10 – 15 working days, with 1 – 4 colour flexo print. We will tell you when a grade-A used box would do the same job for a third of the price.

Most US-made board runs 70 – 90% post-consumer recycled content as standard. Up to 100% recycled test liner is available on request, with the caveat that very high recycled content slightly reduces burst strength for a given basis weight.

Yes, with every coefficient published so you can substitute your own. We use 1.30 kg CO₂e per kg for virgin corrugated and 0.215 kg per kg for a reuse cycle, and we deliberately exclude end-of-life recycling credit, stored fibre carbon and avoided landfill methane — all three would flatter the number.

Around 1.9% on baled OCC in a normal quarter. It rose to 3.4% for two quarters in 2023 after we underestimated a customer's waste stream, and we published that in the same statement as the good numbers. A figure you only share when it flatters you is marketing.

Yes, and several pooled customers do. We will grade to your written standard and report against it. It costs slightly more because it breaks our batching, and we will tell you how much before you commit.

Quoting outside dimensions as inside. A 48-inch outside triple-wall box has a 46.75-inch inside dimension, and nobody discovers the difference until a trailer arrives. Second place: specifying flush to the 48-inch pallet standard when real GMA pallets run from 47.5 to 48.5 inches.