Almost half of Stora Enso’s sales already come from cardboard and packaging. Boxes made of cardboard stay in the home country, because it is not worth transporting them further.
– The packaging is the first contact with the product. We usually think about how it feels, how it looks and how it feels when you open the box? And will there be a wow effect?
Next to Honkavaara is a box where the sleeping experience is also important. The Lahti factory makes the cardboard boxes for the maternity package, which have been many babies’ first beds.
– This is an old box already drawn in the 1960s.
Honkavaara is one of the factory’s ten designers, at whose desk the life of the boxes begins. Sometimes the customer sits in on the creation work, and options are discussed together.
– First we find out what the product is like and where it will be transported. We make sketches, come up with ideas, draw a 2D image on the computer, cut models and test functionality.
The studio has created, among other things, ice cream Christmas calendars, berry boxes and a fish box that replaced styrofoam.
Customers increasingly have the same desire:
– Often the packaging or part of it is plastic and people ask how it could be made from corrugated cardboard.
The cardboard bends into the final product
On the factory side, the corrugated cardboard machine uses rollers to remove corrugated board, or *fluting*, from the roll at high speed. At the end of the machine, the corrugated board folded into a curl is glued between two surface boards, i.e. *kraftliner*. The structure makes the cardboard box durable.
After that, the corrugated board is cut on the line into sheets, which the conveyors move forward in the factory hall to the processing line. Different and colored boxes with prints and perforations are born there.
The factory produces 240 kilometers of 2.8 meter wide corrugated cardboard per day. It would pave the road from Lahti to Turku.
The surface board needed for corrugated board usually comes to the Lahti mill from Stora Enso’s board mills in Oulu or Varkaus. The intervening corrugated cardboard arrives mainly from the Heinola factory.
A small part of the cardboard roll ends up in the bay. Most of the cardboard is exported.
Cardboard is the new paper
The demand for paper began to decline worldwide around 2007, and digitization will continue to reduce paper sales.
Stora Enso is giving up all its paper mills. All that remains in Finland is Anjala’s factory in Kymenlaakso. In Varkaus, the paper machine was changed to a cardboard machine in 2015, and the same was done in Oulu a year ago. There will be another cardboard machine in Oulu, when another former paper machine is converted to produce cardboard.
The cardboard rides on a wave crest, the refraction of which is not visible. Online shopping is growing all the time. At the same time, plastic packaging is increasingly being replaced by cardboard for environmental reasons.
Cardboard is now the number one product of the forest industry in terms of export value. The paper fell off the top spot a couple of years ago.
Cardboard production and export are still nowhere near the peak years of paper.
When paper production decreased, the processing rate of the forest industry decreased. Paper was replaced by pulp, which is, among other things, the raw material for paper, cardboard and tissue paper.
However, Kniivilä emphasizes that pulp is a good product, the sale of which has been very profitable due to the high prices.
– If there had not been good demand for pulp, the effects of the reduction in paper production would have been much more dramatic.
However, a higher degree of processing increases jobs. Export income also increases when more refined products are exported.
According to Stora Enso, almost half of last year’s third quarter sales came from cardboard and packaging business combined.
Among other forest companies, the board company Metsä Board, which belongs to the Metsä Group, is planning Europe’s largest folding board factory in Kaskis.
UPM now gets significant cash flow from paper. Instead of cardboard, the company invests in, for example, biofuels and biochemicals.
Corrugated cardboard should not be transported far
Corrugated cardboard or boxes should not be taken, because even when flattened there is too much air in between. Cardboard rolls can be tightly packed.
However, Stora Enso wants more and more to enter the packaging markets of other countries, as the company bought the Dutch packaging company De Jong Packaging in the fall. In addition to the Netherlands, the deal brings access to the corrugated packaging markets of Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom.
In addition to Finland and Sweden, the company already has packaging factories in China, Poland and the Baltic countries.
However, there is a counter movement in China, as Stora Enso announced that it will sell the Beihai packaging board factory. The company said in the release that it wants to focus on cost-effective production facilities serving the global packaging market, such as the investment in Oulu and the pending purchase of the De Jong company.
A water-resistant plastic replacement is being sought
– The box is leak-proof. When water melts from frozen fish, it stays inside.
However, for this, the cardboard box is lined with a thin plastic film. It can be removed for plastic recycling.
According to Lindi, a huge amount of work is being done for water resistance in various companies and research units, for example at VTT.
– A breakthrough will probably happen in the next few years. It is a plastic-free solution that is completely waterproof, says Lind.