Stora Enso Introduces New Drinking Cup Board
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The Cupforma board family produced at Stora Enso's Imatra Mills in Finland has recently acquired a new member, Cupforma Natura. The company notes that drinking cups made with the new board are lighter than before, "but their functionality is just as good," thanks to the new structure of the board.
Cupforma Natura is made of three pulp layers, and the middle layer also contains chemi-thermomechanical pulp (CTMP). It is available with a polyethylene coating on one or both sides. It is already in production and will eventually replace Cupforma Classic, an existing board grade in the Cupforma product family.
Product development of the new board grade was carried out by Stora Enso in co-operation with a major cup producer and a brand owner in just six months, and Cupforma Natura is now available on the global market. Compared with an existing grade, the development process enabled a weight reduction of 4% to 4.5%, which leads to several benefits for both cupmakers and the environment the company explains—the same number of cups can be produced from less raw material, the cost of board per cup is lower, and even transport costs are reduced.
With the yield improvement, customers can now produce some 10,700 cups with the same amount of board used to produce 10,000 cups in 2006. One truckload, representing some 80 cubic meters of wood, can now be processed into about 85,000 more cups than a few years ago. This source reduction has been made possible with the adoption of multilayer technology in cup board production and by using different pulps in different board layers, Stora Enso points out.
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