Corrugated Packaging

About Corrugated Packaging

Packaging for a Fragile Planet

The corrugated industry is proud of its record for recycling - over 70% of the fibreboard produced each year is made from recycled fibres.
Corrugated board is not made from tropical forest hardwoods - they are entirely unsuitable for the process. In fact the industry uses fast-growing softwoods, which are being replanted faster than they are being used.

Corrugated packaging is a reusable material made from a renewable resource.

As the world’s population expands, so does the demand for packaging. The urgent need is for packaging that has the least harmful impact on the planet. Of course, it will also have to be economic to use.Corrugated packaging provides the balanced solution. The industry has always invested large sums in recovery and recycling processes. It is now so effective that, in the UK alone, over 70% of the 2 million tonnes of fibreboard produced each year is recycled into new packaging. A far higher percentage than any other packaging material. The industry already exceeds the recycling target of 55%, which the EU proposes paper & board packaging groups to achieve by the year 2006

The industry has always been proactive. Long before environmental issues became fashionable the Corrugated Packaging Association created an organisation called REPAK dedicated to the collection and recycling of waste packaging in the UK.

But what makes corrugated packaging superior to any other material is its recyclable nature. Surveys reveal that it is favoured above anything else by environmentalists and consumers.

Corrugated packaging is made exclusively from sustainable forestry resources. The 30 per cent of paper that is made from wood sources such as thinnings (the natural waste product of good forest husbandry) only comes from farmed forests and paper manufacturers are replanting trees faster than they are being consumed. Typically, fast growing softwoods such as pine and spruce are used. Tropical forest hardwoods are unsuitable for packaging papers.

Huge investment in advanced technology means the processes for manufacturing corrugated board are increasingly energy efficient and satisfy the most stringent equirements of environmental legislation. And the industry continues to search for even lower emissions and energy efficiency.

The corrugated packaging industry is proving that environmental concerns and economic packaging are not incompatible. Bigger savings are not made at a cost to the planet. This is because corrugated packaging does not destroy forests, does not use tropical forest hardwoods and does not pollute the atmosphere.

Achieving environmental compliance can produce a healthy profit. Apart from ensuring the long term availability of raw material, recent advances have reduced manufacturing costs, packing and distribution costs and led to easier recycling and waste disposal processes. The industry continues to look at packaging that has a lower environmental impact through the development of single piece, lower weight cases.

Measuring the environmental impact of paper
Corrugated packaging is made from paper, the only packaging material manufactured from a renewable source. The paper cycle will continue in perpetuity provided the harvest of timber does not exceed forest growth and that new trees are planted.

Collection of corrugated packaging for recycling.

Farmed timber, thinnings and sawmill waste are used as raw material. Wood fibres can be used several times in the production of recycled paper. Corrugated packaging plays an important role in the paper cycle and has a good recycling record. Over 70 per cent of all corrugated packaging consumed in western Europe is recycled. The environmental impact is measured using Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) methodologies. This starts by defining the product, function or system to be studied and includes raw materials, emissions, and other waste. The next step is the impact analysis, which examines such effects as global warming, acidification, human toxicity and resource depletion. LCAs look at details such as forestry management and track the material right through to transportation and other logistics issues. National and international standards for LCA methodologies are currently being established.

REPAK (1992 - 1998) was set up by the corrugated packaging industry to formalise the collection, recycling and final disposal of transit packaging waste. It helped UK companies meet packaging legislation introduced by other European countries. Now superseded by statutory Packaging Waste Regulations, REPAK was a forerunner to establishing systems the EC directive has demanded through the ‘Producer Responsibility Obligations (Packaging Waste) Regulations 1997’.

Protecting the forestry resource
Scandinavia is one of the major sources of wood pulp for paper. In Sweden forest growth or replanting exceeds annual felling by up to 35%. One of Europe’s leading manufacturers of corrugated packaging owns large expanses of forestland there. Its ecological policies demonstrate how the industry takes responsibility for ensuring the perpetuity of its raw materials. One of the main priorities is to preserve the bio-diversity in the forests through ecological landscape planning and logging practices. Seed trees are left on around 45% of the forestland, with 12% in combination with planting. These practices and their effects are regularly monitored through ecological audits.

This single piece, die cut pack replaced a box that originally contained expanded polystyrene and plastic fittings. It combines significantly reduced assembly and distribution costs with more effcient use of storage space and complete protection for the computer keyboard.

Using less material in every package
Producing stronger, lighter material is not only an engineering and cost issue, it is an environmental one too. Major producers of corrugated packaging across Europe now use the latest CAD/CAM technology to produce better-engineered solutions and the star is the single-piece, mono-material, die cut, machine-erectable package.

This is an area where the ingenuity of European companies is taking the world lead. The associations of corrugated case makers recently demonstrated that the average weight of corrugated packaging in Europe was 580g/m2 (grams per square metre), in Japan 664g/m2, and in the USA 670g/m2.