The U.S. paper recycling rate remained broadly stable in 2025, even as less recovered paper moved through the market and U.S. mills consumed less recycled fiber.

New figures from the American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA) put the 2025 paper recycling rate at 61%-65%, while the recycling rate for cardboard reached 70%-75%.

Around 45 million tons of paper and paperboard were recycled in the United States during the year, equivalent to roughly 123,000 tons per day. More than 33 million tons of that total was cardboard.

The headline percentages, however, tell only part of the story.

Behind the relatively stable recycling rate was a smaller pool of recovered paper and lower consumption by domestic paper mills.

Recycled Paper Volume Fell to Around 45 Million Tons

Total U.S. recycled paper volume declined from approximately 46 million tons in 2024 to 45 million tons in 2025, a decrease of a little over 2%.

AF&PA linked the decline partly to lower U.S. paper and paperboard production, which reduced the amount of material entering the market and ultimately becoming available for recovery.

This is an important distinction when reading recycling statistics.

A recycling rate measures how much material is recovered relative to the amount available for recovery. It does not necessarily indicate whether the absolute volume of recovered fiber moving through collection systems, sorting operations and mills is increasing.

In 2025, less paper was available for recovery, but collection remained relatively strong compared with that smaller supply.

That is why the recycling rate could remain firm while actual recycled tonnage declined.

U.S. Mills Used 1.3 Million Fewer Tons of Recycled Paper

The change on the consumption side was larger.

U.S. paper mills consumed 31.4 million tons of recycled paper in 2025, down by 1.3 million tons from the 32.7 million tons reported for 2024. That represents a decline of roughly 4%.

For the recovered-paper market, this number deserves as much attention as the recycling rate itself.

Collection is only one part of the fiber cycle. Recovered paper also needs an end market where mills can economically process it into new paper and paperboard products.

AF&PA’s additional 2025 recycling data shows that more than two-thirds of the paper recovered in the United States was used to manufacture new products at U.S. mills, while approximately 29% was exported.

The lower domestic consumption figure therefore does not mean that the recycling system stopped collecting fiber. It shows that mill demand and recovered-paper generation can move differently from the recycling percentage.

Containerboard Remains the Largest Outlet for Recovered Fiber

Packaging continues to play a central role in the U.S. recovered-paper system.

Nearly half of all paper recycled during 2025 — approximately 20 million tons — went into the production of containerboard, the paperboard used to manufacture corrugated boxes.

That figure helps explain why cardboard is particularly important when discussing U.S. paper recycling.

More than 33 million tons of cardboard were recycled during the year, and the cardboard recycling rate stood at 70%-75%.

For corrugated packaging producers and containerboard mills, recovered fiber is not simply a waste-management issue. It remains a substantial industrial raw-material stream feeding back into new packaging production.

As e-commerce, retail distribution, manufacturing and other sectors continue using corrugated packaging, the relationship between box consumption, collection volumes and containerboard production will remain an important part of the recovered-paper market.

The Published Rate Range Moved Slightly Higher

There is another detail worth noting in the numbers.

AF&PA reported a 60%-64% paper recycling rate and 69%-74% cardboard recycling rate for 2024.

For 2025, those ranges became 61%-65% and 70%-75%, respectively.

In other words, both ends of the published ranges moved one percentage point higher, although AF&PA characterized overall recycling performance as holding steady.

The use of ranges is deliberate.

AF&PA explains that parts of its recycling-rate calculation depend on estimates, particularly for areas such as imported and exported product packaging. The association therefore reports a range rather than presenting the calculation as a single precise percentage.

Its current methodology calculates recycled paper as a share of paper and paperboard considered available for recovery and includes adjustments for factors such as trade flows, contamination, moisture and grades that are not readily recovered.

That methodology is important when comparing recycling statistics across different years or different organizations.

What the 2025 Numbers Really Show

From an industry perspective, the most useful takeaway from the 2025 data is not simply that recycling rates remained high.

There are three different movements happening at the same time:

• The recycling-rate range remained broadly stable.
• The absolute volume of recycled paper declined.
• U.S. mill consumption of recovered paper also declined.

Those indicators measure different parts of the fiber cycle.

For mills, recovered-paper dealers and packaging producers, the distinction matters because a strong collection percentage does not automatically mean growing recovered-fiber volumes or stronger domestic consumption.

AF&PA President and CEO Heidi Brock said the 2025 results demonstrate the continued scale of the U.S. paper recovery and reuse system and reiterated the industry’s commitment to keeping recovered fiber circulating into new paper and packaging products.

The 2025 figures support that view in terms of recovery performance.

At the same time, they also show why future analysis of the U.S. recycling market should look beyond the headline percentage.

Recovery rates, available fiber, mill consumption and end-market demand need to be read together.

Last Updated on 01/09/2026 by Jota Machinery