Corrugated Rides E-Commerce Demand To Continued Growth BY TOM KARST
Corrugated box production reached a record level in the pandemic year 2020, and the outlook for continued moderate growth is still in place. The corrugated box industry shipped 407 billion square-feet of prod- uct in 2020, equivalent to about 39 billion boxes, said Rachel Kenyon, Senior Vice President of the Fibre Box Association. That output was the highest since 1999 and up 3.4 percent from 2019, she said.
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After hitting record levels in the late 1990s, corrugated output dipped substantially in the recession year of 2009 to just 345 billion square feet. Since then, corrugated growth had been on a slow climb through 2019. The extra jolt in 2020 corrugated demand attributed to COVID-19 related e-commerce transactions was real, Kenyon said. “E-commerce has been growing for a while, but not at levels that re- ally impacted the industry until last year,” Kenyon said. When demand jumped, Kenyon said suppliers responded. Shipments jumped to record
levels in March last year, tailed off in April and May, but then increased in June and reached record levels again in September and October, she said. “Our industry really ramped up to meet that need, and we’ve continued to operate at that high level,” she said. The U.S. is a net exporter of fiber from trees for corrugated boxes, so the domestic supply is large, and customers are not
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dependent on the recently clunky global supply chain. With holiday and e-commerce demand, Kenyon said corrugated shipments are expected strong through the end of the year. “We have the ready supply of fiber here, and not only that, but we also recycled fiber,” she said, noting that an average corrugated box has 52 percent recycled content. With more than 1,100 corrugated produc- tion facilities in the U.S., each plant serves customers in about a 150-mile radius of each plant. In addition, Kenyon said many suppliers have their own truck fleet, which allows them to sidestep the ongoing shortage of trucks and truck
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December 13, 2021
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