Currently, shipping primarily relies on cardboard boxes that are disposed of and recycled after a single use. As a result, they have a very short lifespan, which increases the volume of recycling but also leads to unnecessarily high energy consumption.

It is not without reason that the principle of ‘reuse’ is placed above the principle of ‘recycle’ in the waste hierarchy. The recycling process costs energy and also leads to irreversible degradation of the recycled material. This means that each new recycling process creates a product of lower quality and, conversely, that paper fibres can only undergo a limited number of recycling processes before they are unusable. The reuse of products is therefore more resource-efficient than recycling and is therefore also prioritised at a political level by the European Commission’s PPWR Regulation.