Trade Maker

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Let's celebrate a great enabler of global trade. No, not the Internet but rather a humble yeoman of commerce without which the Internet would be all ordering and no delivery. We are talking about the corrugated container, better known as the cardboard box. How could we even connect to the Internet without the cardboard boxes that brought us our computers? And how would those myriad goods we order reach us without cardboard boxes? Although e-commerce accounts for only a fraction of cardboard-box sales, it is a very fast-growing fraction and likely a big part of cardboard's future. The reason is plain: 10 copies of a best seller can be shipped from a publisher to a bookstore in a single box. But 10 individuals buying the book from Amazon require 10 cardboard boxes. Online purchases by U.S. consumers surged 48% last year, to $76 billion.

In 2002 the world's cardboard manufacturers turned out 132 billion sq m of the stuff, enough to cover the state of Louisiana, with a value of almost $95 billion. At whatever rate world GDP grows over the next five years, say, 2.5% annually, cardboard production will almost certainly grow a percentage point or more faster.

As with many other great advances, the invention of the cardboard box was a series of strides. In 1856 the English started to use corrugated paper for sweatband linings in stovepipe hats. Albert L. Jones, a New York City inventor, in 1871 was the first to use corrugated as a packing material, for shipping kerosene-lamp chimneys and other glass. Goodbye sawdust and straw. Over the next two decades cardboard evolved into today's familiar sandwich, a corrugated stuffing between two layers of linerboard.

From the timber harvests of North America and Scandinavia, the giants of the industry — led by International Paper of Stamford, Conn. (2002 total sales: $25 billion); Georgia-Pacific of Atlanta ($23.3 billion); Weyerhaeuser of Tacoma, Wash. ($18.5 billion); Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget SCA of Stockholm ($10 billion); and Smurfit-Stone Container of Chicago ($8.2 billion)--churn out millions of tons of linerboard and corrugated. A box can be small enough to hold a wedding ring or large enough for jet skis (4 ft. by 4 ft. by 4 ft. is the maximum, however). The U.S. leads the world in box manufacturing, accounting for more than one-quarter of all production. China last year overtook Japan for second place.

The nations of the former Soviet Union are laggards. Tambrands, now part of Procter & Gamble, started a plant in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1987 to make tampons. Local sourcing was crucial to Tambrands' strategy so that it didn't have to spend dollars. Cotton was not a problem. But there were few boxes. The Soviets favored tank and artillery factories over pulp and paper plants.

Eastern Europe is now playing catch-up. Poland has one of the world's fastest-growing cardboard-box industries. But the region in which box manufacturing is expanding most rapidly (20% over the past five years) is in Central and South America, says industry analyst Paul Bailin. Brazil, Costa Rica and others are building box factories to export avocados, coffee and other produce.

Cardboard is eco-friendly too. A typical cardboard box might begin as linerboard and corrugated filler at a Weyerhaeuser mill in the Pacific Northwest. The raw materials might then travel to a boxmaking factory owned by Weyerhaeuser and SCA in Shanghai or Wuhan. There they are turned into a box with an elaborate design to carry table lamps from a Chinese factory to a Wal-Mart store in Kansas City. Next the box is broken down chemically, turned into pulp again and reconstituted as, say, one to carry country-and-western CDs to Spain. Cardboard fiber can have eight lives.

And, of course, the computer that gets shipped to your home will be outmoded in a year or two. The box it came in will be useful long after that PC becomes a doorstop.