Written by P. Whitfield, Yard Lead
The first thing you notice when you walk into our yard at 2350 W 2nd Ave is the smell. It is not a bad smell. It is the specific, dry, slightly woody smell of a lot of corrugated stacked under a roof, and it is the same smell every box recycler in North America has in common. We have come to find it weirdly comforting.
Zone A — Inbound docks.
Eighteen bay doors line the south wall. Trucks back in, scale tickets get logged, and our dock supervisor — Marisol on most weekdays — assigns a pallet card to every load. The pallet card is the most important piece of paper in the building. Without it, a box has no identity, and an unidentified box gets baled by default.
Zone B — Grading tables.
Four knee-high roller tables sit in a long row down the middle of the building. This is where our graders eyeball every gaylord that comes through — looking for delaminated walls, torn flaps, label residue, suspicious staining, and anything that would prevent us from putting the box back into service. A grader can move a hundred boxes an hour on a good day; on a slow day they move fifty and tell us bad jokes about flute profiles.
Zone C — Reclaim and re-tape.
Boxes that need a little love come here. We re-tape with water-activated gummed paper tape — never plastic — and apply a fresh grade stamp. About 12% of inbound boxes pass through Zone C; the rest go straight from grading to outbound storage.
Zone D — Baler and OCC bunker.
Anything that cannot be reused gets baled. Our 60 HP vertical baler eats about 120 tons of OCC per month and produces 1,200-pound bales tied with 11-gauge wire. The bales sit in a 14-foot bunker until a truck takes them to a downstream paper mill.
Zone E — Outbound storage.
Drive-in racks fill the north end of the building. Pallets are organized by footprint and grade. Our WMS — a slightly customized open-source platform we have been running since 2017 — can find any pallet in under 90 seconds. We are quietly proud of that.
Zone F — Dispatch hut.
A 12-foot square hut with two screens, a CB radio nobody uses, and a clipboard with all the routes for the day. Dispatch is run by Theo, who has been here since the year we got our first truck. He still routes most loads in his head and only updates the screen when somebody else needs to read the plan.
We host tours once a month for partners, journalists, sustainability teams, and the occasional school group. If you'd like to come see the place in person, drop us a line.