The Cardboard Box Economy Is Breaking Down

**Ryan Dezember** (0:05)
Okay, I'm Ryan Dezember. I am a reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:09)
That's a great name you have there, Ryan.

**Ryan Dezember** (0:11)
Yeah, it is. Good one for you too.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:16)
Two Ryans in two different studios, here to talk about one cardboard box. You're holding one in your hand right now.

**Ryan Dezember** (0:25)
Yeah, I grabbed one because they're everywhere these days.
The technical term is a corrugated packaging. Cardboard is actually more like your paper cup, but we don't have to quibble about that.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:37)
We won't. Cardboard, container board, you know what I'm talking about. The brown shipping box is maybe the least exotic object in the world. The stuff is everywhere, crammed in recycling bins on doorsteps, stacked inside e-commerce warehouses.
Yet, if you thought we were living in the era of peak cardboard, you'd actually be wrong.

**Ryan Dezember** (1:05)
So, you probably wouldn't guess it, but we're actually on a per capita basis, America's using a lot less cardboard than we used to.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:12)
Really?

**Ryan Dezember** (1:12)
Yeah. When you break it down to boxes per person, we peaked in 1999, which is sort of hard to believe.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:20)
I'm surprised that there's less container board being used now in an era of online shopping than there was 20 years ago.

**Ryan Dezember** (1:28)
Think about when you used to get a delivery from Amazon and you'd open it, it'd be like a box inside another box with another little box with the small thing you ordered. Technology and a lot of work on their end has gotten rid of that, right?

**Ryan Knutson** (1:42)
Not only did the box inside the box inside the box start disappearing, but boxes themselves have also gotten smaller and lighter. More stuff started showing up in plastic mailers, and more boxes are getting made from old recycled ones.
So, I mean, overall, this sounds good. There's less waste, there's more recycling, but there obviously must be a downside here to somebody, otherwise we wouldn't be talking.

**Ryan Dezember** (2:08)
Yes. The downside is if you were selling trees.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:13)
Specifically, pulpwood.
That's a type of wood used to make cardboard. And recently, in the pulpwood market, like a poorly taped box, the bottom fell out.

**Ryan Dezember** (2:27)
It varies highly by market, but some markets you might have gotten $16 a ton, $15 a ton, and now you might get zero.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:35)
Zero dollars a ton?

**Ryan Dezember** (2:37)
Yeah.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:37)
So basically, you're saying this stuff is worthless.

**Ryan Dezember** (2:39)
Yes.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:42)
What does this mean for the tree growers, the people whose livelihoods depend on selling these trees?

**Ryan Dezember** (2:47)
It's an existential crisis.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:53)
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knutson.
It's Thursday, September 3rd.

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This episode is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. People have hard questions about AI.
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**Ryan Knutson** (4:25)
In many parts of the American South, a forest isn't just a place where towering pine trees grow wild. Trees are a crop.
Ryan Dezember has a way of visualizing this.

**Ryan Dezember** (4:38)
Go to your Google Earth or your online map, set it into satellite mode, zero in on the South, find something that's green, not like a wildlife refuge or a national park, but any other stretch that's green. And as you zoom in, more likely than not, you're going to find that the trees are all planted in neat rows.

**Ryan Knutson** (5:01)
Neat rows of carefully planted loblolly pines, tree farms. In the timber industry, the big money is in lumber. That's the processed wood that comes from mature 20 or 30 year old trunks that eventually turn into two by fours and telephone poles.
And like any crop, there's a tried and true way to get the best harvest.

**Ryan Dezember** (5:21)
They say plant them thick and cut them quick.