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This video highlights the how the Slice® Box Cutter, featuring a unique, ergonomic J-hook design, is excellent for breaking down boxes. Our box cutters, with Slice safety blades, get the job done quickly and safely. Breaking down boxes is a task that most of us would prefer to do quickly, but safety needs to be a top priority when using tools like box cutters. Fortunately, Slice® makes safe, ergonomic box cutters so breaking down cardboard boxes fast doesn’t put you at high risk of injury.

How Slice Makes Breaking Down Cardboard Boxes Safer

Slice safety starts with the blade, which is 100 percent zirconium oxide, a high-quality advanced ceramic. Each Slice blade features our patent-pending finger-friendly® edge grind: it’s so safe, you can touch it. In comparison, traditional metal and ceramic blades are dangerously sharp. Slice stands alone in creating a truly safer blade. Our box cutters feature a unique J-hook design. It’s ergonomic and the wrap-around handle protects your fingers from protruding objects like metal staples. Ergonomics is a key aspect of safety: it encourages a natural grip and motion to reduce fatigue and overuse injuries or discomfort. The blade exposure with Slice box cutters is shallower than traditional box cutters by design: it’s deep enough to cut through single- and double-walled corrugated, but not so deep as to cut through what’s inside the box. This means that the contents of your box stay safe. Slice makes two box cutter models: the Manual Box Cutter and the Auto-Retractable Box Cutter. When you’re looking for how to break down boxes, either tool will do the job well. Both box cutters ship with an installed Rounded-Tip Box Cutter Blade and are compatible with the Pointed-Tip Box Cutter Blades. When these tools aren’t in use, you can retract the blade into the handle for safe storage. With the Manual Box Cutter, the user must engage the slider to expose the blade, and then re-engage the slider to retract the blade back into the handle. With the Auto-Retractable Box Cutter, the user must keep the slider engaged to keep the blade exposed. If they release the slider—as would happen if they dropped the tool—the blade will automatically retract into the handle. The option that provides the best way to cut up cardboard boxes depends on the environment you’re working in and the level of safety you’re after.

Why Slice Is Great for How to Break Down Cardboard Boxes Quickly

Now that safety has been addressed, let’s turn to speed! Whether you’re breaking down boxes for recycling or you’re sorting out how to flatten a box for storage, the less time you spend, the better. This is a chore; let’s get on with it! If you plan to use your box cutter quickly, you’ll want a tool that’s

  • sturdy
  • easy to handle
  • precise
  • lightweight
  • durable

Slice meets all of these criteria with well-constructed tools. The unique ergonomic design of Slice box cutters makes them easy to use. The front and back of the tool sits flush against the cardboard when it’s in use for excellent, precise, firm control. The handle is made of a durable, lightweight glass-infused nylon, so it stands up to demanding environments like construction sites and warehouses. Home use? No problem. With such an easy-to-use, solid tool, you can confidently whip through breaking down boxes. Another aspect of speed is efficiency, and this includes having your tool handy, and being able to do maintenance easily. That J-hook design makes the Slice box cutters easy to hook on a pocket, in a belt loop, on a hook, or on a peg. The tool is at hand whenever you need it. With any bladed tool, you’ll need to replace the blade on occasion: a dull blade is a dangerous blade. Unlike traditional metal blades, Slice safety blades do not dull quickly. In fact, Slice blades last up to 11 times longer than their steel counterparts. This alone saves you time! Changing the blade requires no extra tools, so you can get back to breaking down boxes quickly.

How to Break Down a Cardboard Box

Now let’s turn to the fundamentals of how to break down boxes. When you go to break down a cardboard box, the top will likely be open. A common breakdown method is to flip the box over and cut the packing tape holding down the flaps on the bottom. Open all flaps, top and bottom, and the box will collapse flat. If you need to break down your box into smaller pieces, leave the bottom intact, open the top flaps, and put the box on its side. Cut through the cardboard along the edges of the box, both sides and the bottom; push the now-free side piece of your box down, and flip the box 90 degrees. Cut along the bottom and uncut edge to free another side of your box. Continue until all four sides and the bottom of the box are individual pieces. Today we receive more boxes than ever, which means that we need to properly dispose of them. It’s no longer necessary to use dangerously sharp box cutters or objects not made for the job—like keys, a kitchen knife, or a pen—to get the job done. With Slice, you’ll be breaking down boxes confidently, quickly, and safely. Tom Hodgkinson speaks out against the box folding phobia which has gripped the nation Everyone these days is aware of the idea of recycling and saving the planet. Why is it, then, that the same people who go on climate change marches and embrace a meat-free diet seem to be completely unable to flatten empty cardboard boxes before putting them in the recycling? Call me a petty-minded, grumpy pedant, but this is an issue that enrages me. And I see signs of a general inability to flatten cardboard boxes everywhere I go, so I am often to be found in a state of irritation. At the fashionable shared office space where I work, there are giant signs by the bins which read FLATTEN ALL BOXES. They are ignored: alongside them are piled heaps of unflattened boxes, left there by millennial tech workers who have three degrees in Computer Science from Oxford and Cambridge but are unable to carry out this basic procedure. Grrr! My teenage children appear similarly unable to flatten cardboard boxes. They give their cereal boxes a slight squash and then squeeze them into the recycling bags. I see the problem everywhere. When I walk along my street on a Monday morning before the dustmen arrive, I survey the recycling bags which are left outside people’s houses. Again, I see unflattened boxes taking up absurd amounts of space. I think how irritated I would be by this fundamental lethargy were I a worker in the waste industry. Bah! Humbug. If I raise the issue with my children, they look at me as if I’m really sad and completely insane. Maybe this is negligence regarding cardboard box management is a sign of a broader unwillingness to take responsibility. Briefly put, people seem to want servants. I often think that Uber’s popularity – and of the gig economy in general – is reactionary: it’s based on the desire to behave like a spoilt medieval king, and be surrounded by footmen and valets. Uber temporarily exalts you to the level of a prince or cabinet minister with your own private coach and six. Same with food delivery companies. They are butlers. We all want our own Jeeves. Thus it is that the middle classes feel it is somehow below them to flatten boxes. Someone else can do that. But look… flattening boxes is a very simple process, and it’s fun too! You may need a key or knife to slice the brown or black tape that many of them are sealed with. Then you fold them flat and hey presto, you can fit far more boxes in the recycling. SELECTED COMMENTS These comments were mailed to us after the above piece was sent as a newsletter. We like to publish a selection and reserve the right to edit them for clarity. Feel free to drop us a line with your stories. I fully concur with your views on flattening cardboard boxes! Apart from the middle class remark perhaps – because that would imply that the working classes are busy flattening theirs, which I would tend to doubt. Rauert Brodersen There is a report that every household buys a bag-for-life every week, because many people shop spontaneously or haven’t taken bags for some (possibly legitimate) reason. So why aren’t supermarkets piling up their emptied cardboard delivery boxes, so people can claim on and take their shopping away in those? This happened when plastic bags were always charged for 30+ years ago. Then flatten the box when no longer needed – I nearly always flatten mine, if not full with other boxes. Regards Jago I flatten all cardboard like mental. But then again, I am South Devon Top Domestic Recycler (Small to Medium Sized Towns) for three years running! Roy Wilkinson I’m absolutely with you on this point. I’m a big box flattener and take pleasure in it. When I lived in New York City it was so annoying to see the big recycle bags on the pavement with unflattened boxes in them. The building staff in our building didn’t bother to flatten them and the tenants couldn’t be bothered: most tenants didn’t even sort their recycling. Malcolm Wright With you, but just one point. My local recycling also asks us to remove sticky tape from boxes, not just to cut through it to flatten the boxes! Anna Thorley


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