Most of the merchandise that arrives at our warehouses comes in cardboard boxes. The boxes are delivered to our stores where they are stripped and made into large “bales”. All stores create these bales and return them to our warehouses where they are then sent to a recycling center. Eventually the recycled cardboard finds its way back to the market as new boxes and other paper products.

Plastic wrap is another material that is used heavily in our industry.   As with the cardboard, we created large “bales” of this from the returns from our stores and from our warehouses.  These bales are also sent to a recycling center for processing. 

 

 

A variety of different sizes of plastic produce crates, bread trays, soda and milk crates are used to carry merchandise from the vendors to our warehouses and on to our stores.  The stores in turn send back the empties to our warehouses.  From there they are returned to the suppliers who put them back into use again.  There is a constant flow of these items from the suppliers, to our warehouse, to our stores, then back to the warehouse and back to the supplier and so on…

We use over one million wooden pallets per year just to get our merchandise stocked in our warehouses and shipped to our stores.  The pallets at the stores are also returned to our warehouse for immediate re-use.  We also return many of them to selected vendors who ship their next truckload of product to us on those very same pallets. We also recycle scrapped metals and wood pieces regularly.

 

We continually review ways to recycle and re-use these important materials and we’re open to any suggestions, and improvements. Please feel free to post a comment on our 99 Green page.

99 Thanks for your continuing support of our stores and environmental causes.