Amazon Boxes a Holiday Gift for Paper Mills

U.S. paper mills hope to take advantage of the "Amazon effect" this holiday season and recycle a glut of used cardboard boxes into new paper products.

After the decline of newsprint, the rise of e-commerce is helping American paper mills transition to containerboard, or cardboard, because behemoths like Amazon.com Inc. are driving up demand.

FedEx Corp., UPS Inc., the U.S. Postal Service and Amazon will ship almost 2.5 billion parcels between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve, The Wall Street Journal projects. American households produce 25% more waste during that same period, according to EPA.

Meanwhile, China, formerly the world's top destination for exports of solid waste, in 2018 stopped accepting imports of recyclables too contaminated with garbage.

Now, used cardboard boxes are flooding the domestic recycling industry.

"China's action has left a global oversupply of material, meaning much lower prices. Currently cardboard is at 25-year lows," Waste Management Inc.'s vice president of recycling, Brent Bell, said in an email.