The best products in the world will be worthless if we cannot get them safely to where they need to be. Every step in the value chain is vital and all of them have different requirements in terms of transport and logistics. One of the most crucial, but often under-recognised factor is packaging. Packaging is more than just placing goods into a simple cardboard box. It is a system to ensure safe, cheap, and efficient movement through the entire supply chain. Product and packaging go hand in hand, both are equally important because they complete each other.
Corrugated Carton Box
The most common type of packaging material used for transport and logistics would be the lightweight corrugated carton box. It is widely used in the industry, with many preferring them over plastic, polystyrene, or simple paper wrappings. The corrugated carton box is not just cost effective, is also effective in taking a beating throughout its migration through the supply chain while protecting the valuables within. Furthermore, its toughness adds to its prolonged use and potential reusability. And with sustainability practices becoming more and more important these days, it may be the more environmentally-friendly packaging option when compared to the rest because:
Cardboard and paper are readily accepted recyclables in Malaysia – recycled cardboard and paper are used in the construction of new cardboard, using less resources like virgin fibre from trees and water
Cardboard and paper are biodegradable – accidental litter may not harm biodiversity as much as inorganic items like plastics
The corrugated carton box is tough enough to warrant reusability – potential to reduce waste and need for new units
But what is a corrugated carton box?
Its origins can be traced back to an early packaging material using cardboard known as the paper box in 1817 in England. The cardboard box was perhaps made famous by the Kellogg’s brothers who used it to package their cereal in their Battle Creek Sanatorium, Michigan in the early 1800s. Corrugated paper, a sheet of paper that has been processed to have wavy folds, as an improved design to paper packaging only came later, evident from a patent filed in the US by Mr. Albert Jones in 1871. The combination of the cardboard box and corrugated paper created the now ubiquitous corrugated carton box, a sturdier packaging material than the two components when used alone.
Two layers of liner sandwiching a fluting a medium to produce the wall of a corrugated carton box, which is also known as a three-ply corrugated carton box to correspond to the number of layers making up the wall.
A typical design of a corrugated carton box possesses a combined layer of alternating cardboard box, called the liner, and corrugated paper, known as the fluting medium. This design now makes the piece of cardboard difficult to bend. It is this property that makes the corrugated carton box the unsung hero of transporting your products safely to the retail shelves with great efficiencies.
Stack’em High
The stronger walls give structure to a cardboard container, allowing us to stack them on one another with little risk of it crumpling, provided that the top layers of corrugated carton box is not overstuffed. We can now arrange these stacks of boxes on pallets for bulk transfers using a material handling equipment like a reach truck. These pallets can also be stored on a selective racking system to increase storage space.
Other than increasing efficiencies of storage and time, accuracy may also improve when standardised-sized corrugated carton boxes are stacked on standardised-sized pallets. In addition to the warehouse floor workers, other members of the warehouse will benefit from this standardisation – from coordinators being able to make precise plans to equipping the sales team to draw up the best deals for customers.
Thannesh, Mexpower Reach Truck Operator, double checks the correct pallet of goods stored in corrugated carton boxes stacked on one another before retrieving it from the selective racking system using a reach truck.
Benefitting Our Customer
At Mexpower, our customers enjoy a peace of mind knowing that we safely store and deliver all their goods safely in corrugated carton boxes. In fact, it is policy that all wares are to be stored in five-ply (three layers of liner with two layers of fluting medium in the gaps) corrugated carton boxes in the distribution centre* we operate for two homegrown fast fashion brands to benefit from their stacking ability. While not a major force, we fully utilise this feature with our selective pallet racking, increasing space efficiency of the distribution centre. We even proactively proposed to our customer to REDUCE the space of their distribution centre to effectively save them 28% on rental cost!
If you are wondering whether we create lots of waste from these boxes, we actually do not! We retrieve all unwanted cartons from our customers’ brick and mortar shops and reuse all the ones that are intact. A small percentage of them may come back in bad conditions ie. torn, wet, extremely deformed, and etc. and these we send to recycling collection centres close to our warehouse. Since the beginning of the year, we have only sent slightly more than 500 kg of cardboard wastes to be recycled, having to replenish a comparatively small number of cartons for our operational needs!
In the next installment on the corrugated carton box, we will discuss further about the fluting medium.
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