The work aims to improve the efficiency of simulating corrugated cardboard and consequently replace experimental testing with finite element methods, so as to save time and cost, reduce environmental pollution, and thus promote sustainable development and provide decision-making basis for the optimization design of corrugated cardboard boxes. Starting from the mechanical properties of linerboard and corrugated medium, the minimum unit of corrugated cardboard was modeled at a 1∶1 for analysis. Compression performance of corrugated cardboard was simulated and solved using ANSYS, and the results were analyzed to find an equivalent method for the mechanical properties of corrugated cardboard. By utilizing the equivalent mechanical properties of corrugated cardboard, the model of corrugated cardboard was simplified to some extent to improve the solving speed while ensuring a certain level of accuracy. The mechanical properties of linerboard and corrugated medium could be equivalent using a bilinear isotropic hardening model. The compression process of corrugated cardboard was divided into four stages:elastic, yielding, plateau, and densification. Simulation was carried out using the Static Structure module of the ANSYS Workbench. Compared with experimental results, the simulation could effectively predict its compression performance. After simplifying corrugated cardboard to a homogeneous rectangular prism, simulation results showed that the simplified model reduced the solving time of flat pressing finite element analysis by 13% to 60%, and reduced the memory usage by 37% to 62%, with greater reductions for larger model sizes. Using this method to simulate the compression performance of corrugated cardboard solves the drawbacks of optimizing packaging design through repeated experiments in the past. It saves time, reduces production costs, and environmental pollution of corrugated cardboard, and achieves sustainable development.