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The medium is the message

The need to produce lower-weight, yet strong, corrugated board requires innovation up and down the value chain—innovation that has been lacking in North America.

Pw 6769 Pederzani Photo

There are cost, revenue, and environmental benefits to be attained with high-performance, light-weight (HPLW) packaging grades. Their value lies in allowing packaging professionals to uniquely engineer designs that offer improvements over existing packages. With a more comprehensive palette of raw materials we can add substance to the word “sustainability.”

The primary obstacle is that the North American board market is stagnant compared to containerboard and converting equipment innovations originating offshore. Notable examples of this are the high-speed flat-bed die cutter, the modern corrugator, the high-speed in-line laminator, precision folder gluers, and a variety of paper machine enhancements.
There are several reasons. Some have to do with the installed paper machine base, concentrated corporate ownership, and the predominance of mill/box plant integration. Add to that the challenge of learning new converting and sales skills, and it results in industry inertia.

A renaissance in paper mill production could have begun with the introduction of Edge Crush Test (ECT) box certification in 1991. Seventeen years after the certification rules were changed to allow compression strength, based on the ECT, significant change is evident in every major market except North America.

The adoption of the ECT option can benefit the customer, the box maker, and the environment. It allows flexibility in the choice of containerboard components. Those choices would, ideally, result in the most efficient use of raw materials to achieve a given performance target. What has happened to the grade structure and does that reflect the opportunities envisioned when the “alternate rule” was approved? For this discussion I have limited myself to examining corrugated medium.

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