3A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2018
Lab creates paper options for plastic packaging
packaging company ecoXpac.
Paper a more
renewable
resource
The problem with paper
By CASSANDRA
PROFITA
Oregon Public Broadcasting
Packaging designer Ryan
Gaither believes in the power
of cardboard.
He’s laid down a mas-
sive sheet of it — as big as a
king-size bed — at the Swed-
ish-owned
BillerudKorsnäs
design lab in Portland.
He flips the switch on a
machine that zips around the
cardboard, stabbing and cutting
it with a robotic knife.
“Basically anything we cre-
ate — any design we’re looking
to validate – we cut out with this
machine,” he said. “This lets us
know if we’re on the right track
or on a fool’s errand.”
When it’s done, he folds the
resulting cut-out into a three-di-
mensional shape that fits per-
fectly around the edge of a lap-
top. It’s designed to replace the
plastic foam end caps compa-
nies use to ship computers.
Gaither says inventions like
this are helping the company
build a growing customer list.
“I think now people are more
concerned about the impact
plastics are having on the envi-
ronment,” he said. “Paper pack-
aging is a much more renew-
able resource. It biodegrades.”
A growing number of cam-
paigns to ban plastic waste are
putting pressure on companies
to find alternatives — not just
for straws, but for all kinds of
plastic packaging.
Years ago, the Swed-
ish paper company Billerud-
Korsnäs acquired a Portland
packaging company called Pac-
cess. Their office in southwest
Portland is now a lab where
engineers redesign packaging
Cassandra Profita/Oregon Public Broadcasting
BillerudKorsnäs designers use a shaking machine to test
the protective power of the paper packaging they create.
and test out paper products they
can sell into a budding market
for plastic replacements.
Their customers are now
using cardboard in place of
clear plastic packaging for
camping gear. They’re using
paper bags instead of plastic
ones for food like pasta. The
company is even working on a
paper soda bottle.
Moonshot
Tor Lundqvist, head of the
Americas division of Billerud-
Korsnäs, calls this paper bot-
tle initiative a “fly to the moon
kind of thing.”
The company prides itself
on its sustainably managed for-
ests. And it has a secret process
for making super-strong paper
products.
“We can use these prod-
ucts in solutions where they
can actually push out plastic
for plastic bags, for instance,
or plastic trays and even plastic
boxes,” Lundqvist said.
Any time you replace plas-
tic with paper, he said, it does
more than reduce plastic pollu-
tion. It also helps with climate
change because plastic is made
from fossil fuels while the trees
used to make paper actually
absorb heat-trapping carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere.
But making a beverage bot-
tle out of paper is pushing the
company to go even further in
its mission to challenge con-
ventional packaging.
“Our CEO wanted us to do
something really difficult with
our raw material that people
thought was not possible to do,”
said Lundqvist. “It’s going very
well. It looks like we are going
to have a product on the market
in the near future.”
A promotional video on the
project shows the process the
company is going through to
create the paper bottle and test
its durability with the Danish
Critics say paper packaging
isn’t always as sustainable as
it looks. The real challenge for
BillerudKorsnäs, they say, will
be making sure the company’s
paper bottle is easily recyclable
or biodegradable.
Conrad MacKerron, who
works for As You Sow — a
nonprofit that is teaming up
with investors and pushing big
manufacturers to change their
plastic packaging — has heard
about the BillerudKorsnäs
paper bottle project, and he says
he doubts the company can cre-
ate a leak-proof bottle purely
out of paper.
“The devil’s in the details,”
he said. “Paper cups — in gen-
eral we think of them as recy-
clable, but because of the thin
plastic lining a lot of paper
mills cannot process them. So
they reject the cups, and they
go to landfills.”
According to Billerud-
Korsnäs, the first version of its
paper bottle will be released in
2019 and it will have a plas-
tic barrier inside. However, the
company is also planning to
release two more versions over
with Macaroni & Cheese,
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Clatsop Post 12
FOR
L
Meanwhile,
Billerud-
Korsnäs is seeing 25 percent
revenue growth year after year.
At the company’s lab in
Portland, designers slide the
laptop with paper end caps into
a box and test it to see if the
paper can match the protective
power of plastic.
First, they place it onto a
mechanical arm that drops it
from 3 feet off the ground.
Then, they strap it into a
shaking machine that mim-
ics the bumps on a delivery
truck. Finally, a third machine
squeezes it between two metal
arms.
During each test, designers
measure the impact to the lap-
top, and so far it looks like the
paper is holding up. There are
no dents in the box and no dam-
age to the laptop inside. That
could one day mean more cus-
tomers for the company, and
more laptops getting shipped in
plastic-free packaging.
1132 Exchange Street
325-5771
J OAN H ERMAN
A
Can the paper match
the plastic?
Ham Steak
Dinner
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tic they found. The groups that
organized the cleanup are now
calling on the top manufac-
turers of that plastic to replace
their packaging.
Clatsop Post 12
6PM
“Karaoke Dave”
WANTED
the next five years. The second
version will have a bio-based
barrier inside, the company
says, and a third version will be
biodegradable.
MacKerron said a lot of big
companies have finally started
taking the problem of plastic
pollution seriously within the
last year.
“I think most companies
were hoping this concern about
plastic pollution would blow
over,” he said. “That tune has
changed because people are
so appalled and offended at
how bits of plastic are now just
everywhere.”
Scientists say the world is
sending 8 million tons of plas-
tic into the oceans every year,
and it never really goes away.
It’s killing fish, seabirds and
turtles, and it’s even showing
up in food and drinking water.
“I think the sense that it’s
become pervasive is what can
turn the tide and come up with
perhaps radical solutions that
were not thinkable three, four,
five years ago,” MacKerron
said.
This fall, thousands of vol-
unteers in the Pacific Northwest
and across the world picked up
trash and tallied up the plas-
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