Visy

Richard Pratt started making cardboard boxes in nineteen fifty six. His son Anthony asked a question that changed the business forever: what if the boxes we sell come back to us as raw material? Every carton shipped to Coles and Woolworths eventually ended up in a bin. Anthony built a system to collect those bins and turn the waste back into new boxes. Virgin cardboard fibre costs six hundred to eight hundred dollars per tonne on the open market. Recycled fibre that Visy collects from its own retail customers costs one hundred to two hundred dollars. That is a four to six hundred dollar saving on every tonne of raw material. Visy processes one point five million tonnes a year. The saving runs six hundred to nine hundred million dollars annually. Here is where the advantage compounds. When cardboard prices spike, every competitor's costs spike with them — they buy fibre at market rates. Visy's input costs barely move because the fibre arrives as used packaging from the same retailers who are about to buy new boxes.