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EXCELLENCE CENTRE INVITES FOR COLLABORATION
Metsä Board’s Excellence Centre is an active collaboration environ- ment for exploration, innovation and testing. Its mission is to explore the exciting potential of lightweight paperboards made of renew- able fresh fiber. “To do this in a multidisciplinary way, we offer our customers co-creation workshops based on their needs: to improve current packaging or create new solutions,” says Metsä Board’s Customer Experience Manager Gunilla Nykopp . Since its launch, the Excellence Centre has organized about 70 virtual workshops for its customers, who are mainly packaging man- ufacturers and brand owners. Now the collaboration will increasingly move to a hybrid or in-person sessions. “During a workshop, we can actually make demos of the package designs, try out how they fold, and what they feel like when handled,” says Nykopp. According to Nykopp, a large proportion of customers want to replace or reduce the use of plastics in their packages. “It is the number one topic in all our workshops, where resource efficient and sustainable wood fiber offers an excellent solution.”
From left to right: Customer Experience Manager Gunilla Nykopp, Structural Packaging Designer Iiro Numminen, Graphic Packaging Designer Marko Leiviskä, Mechanical Design Engineer Joni Myyryläinen, and Ilkka Harju, Packaging Services Director, EMEA and APAC.
ROADMAPS VISUALIZE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Metsä Board has published new detailed roadmaps that visualize the measures that will be taken to achieve the ambi- tious 2030 targets regarding climate change and water use. The roadmaps summarize Metsä Board’s plans and actions to reach its targets and offer additional information. “A lot of our customers want to improve the environmental performance of their packaging. That is why they want to know how we proceed with our targets, and that
is one important reason why we decided to create these tools,” says Sustainability Manager Sari Koski. The roadmaps were developed by the Finnish software company AskKauko. AskKauko’s Impact OS platform is designed to measure and visualize sus- tainability data clearly and transparently.
Take a look at the roadmaps at metsaboard.impact.page/roadmap/Home
CALIFORNIA GETS TOUGH ON PLASTIC
The State of California passed major legislation in July 2022 to signif- icantly reduce single-use plastic packaging in the state – as well as drastically boost recycling rates. With this legislative package, Cali- fornia has set the toughest require- ments for the use of plastic packag- ing in the USA. Anu Rehtijärvi , Market Intelligence Manager for Metsä Board, says that California has been a USA forerun- ner in matters relating to the use of plastic for years. “With this bill, it is clear that Cali- fornia wants to go to the source and reduce the amount of plastic that is being used,” Rehtijärvi says, adding that alternative materials such as cartonboard are also very much in the picture.
Under the bill, plastic producers must reduce plastics in single-use products by 10% by 2027, increasing to 25% by 2032. That reduction in plastic packaging can be met through a combination of reducing pack- age sizing, switching to a different material or making the product easily reusable or refillable. Also by 2032, plastic packaging has to be recycled at a rate of 65%, mak- ing this a huge leap from today’s rates (around 14% overall in the USA). Under the legislation, plastic mak- ers are required to form an Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) system to facilitate the creation of the required recycling infrastructure. Other states such as Maine, Oregon and Colorado already have similar EPR systems.
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