Cardboard is having a good year.
Prices for old corrugated cardboard, or OCC, have been rising in 2026 as demand for recycled fiber improves while supply tightens — a perfect storm. Packaging Dive reports that OCC prices have risen incrementally every month in 2026, and the longer-term forces behind cardboard recovery are not exactly slowing down. More retail and e-commerce means more boxes moving through homes, businesses, and recycling facilities, and with the US moving away from virgin containerboard, long-term prospects look promising for OCC.
For MRF operators, that makes a familiar question even more important today: how much cardboard are you actually recovering?
OCC is already one of the highest-volume commodities moving through many single-stream facilities. At Republic Services’ Denver MRF, for example, cardboard makes up roughly 67% of the material the facility processes, with mixed paper adding another 17%.
That is a lot of fiber. And historically, it has been a difficult part of the MRF to automate.
Fiber is a different robotics problem
Most recycling robots were originally designed around containers moving down relatively narrow belts. A fiber QC line looks very different.
The belts are wide and material tends to overlap. Large pieces of OCC can cover smaller objects, and the burden depth can change dramatically from one minute to the next. And the robot needs to move a much larger object reliably, over and over again, in an environment that was never designed for precision machinery.
Good thing we built our robot for those exact conditions.
Our AI can identify OCC, newsprint, office paper, and other fiber grades, alongside dozens of other common curbside commodities. The robot has already demonstrated production performance on fiber QC lines, where Glacier customers have used automation to improve paper quality and reduce manual sorting. At one California MRF, Glacier robots helped increase paper purity by 17%, while maintaining 95% uptime and delivering an eight-month payback.
Glacier has also deployed specifically on fiber lines to recover cardboard and other valuable material. At Penn Waste, for example, Glacier’s system was installed on the fiber line to improve recovery of cardboard and PET.
What does that look like in TONS?
This is where fiber robotics gets interesting.
At a recent Glacier installation, our robot has been picking more than 250 pounds of cardboard per hour.
Run that across an eight-hour shift and you are looking at roughly 2,000 pounds of OCC. One ton of cardboard. One robot. One shift.
And unlike a sorter, the robot does not need the line to slow down because the shift is getting long. It can keep working through breaks, staffing gaps, and the ugly parts of the burden. Also, our robot shows up for its shift (one of our MRF partners casually dropped that 38% of their sorters no-showed today… and we know they’re not the only ones dealing with staffing issues).
The fiber line deserves more attention
MRFs have spent years automating containers. We suggest taking a closer look at fiber QC.
The commodity is valuable and the volumes are enormous and consistent. The labor challenge is real, and worsening. And the technology has finally caught up with the physical realities of the line.
Glacier’s robot was designed around those realities: wide belts, irregular material, high throughput, and the need to keep running in a demanding MRF environment.
So while everyone else is watching the OCC market, we are watching something more concrete:
How many tons are making it into the bale instead of getting past your sorters?
Because when a robot can recover a ton of cardboard in a shift, the fiber line starts to look a lot more interesting 👀