Iggesund Paperboard, Sweden, is advising customers to expect an upgrading of its folding box board Incada. Beginning this autumn, Incada will be whiter and lighter and also have a number of improved properties affecting printability. Incada Exel, which is more targeted as a packaging board, will also have improved stiffness. For grammages over 300 gsm, this gain will be as much as 10% to 15%.
"This enables our customers to reduce their packaging weights while keeping the same protection for the contents," explains Robin Lewis, technical product manager for Incada.
The stiffness improvements have also led to a revision of Incada Exel's grammage range to better suit the demands of the current customer base. Other substantial improvements have been made to the odor and taste properties so that Incada now comes in under the Robinson testâ detection limit of 0.6. The whiteness is increased by 7.5 units to 120 on the CIE scale. There also are improvements in the L value, which is critical for color reproduction. Runnability is also improved, so Incada will now be able to function even better in customers' processes.
"Incada was introduced in 2001 and since then we've made many small changes to improve its quality," Lewis says. This is a big leap forward and it will definitely strengthen our market position."
The biggest change of all in relation to the production of Incada, though, has nothing whatsoever to do with printability or the economy of customers' production processes. Incada is manufactured at Iggesund Paperboard's mill in Workington, England. This spring the mill changed its energy source from fossil natural gas to biomass, which is burned in a new high-tech power plant. Overnight, the mill eliminated its fossil carbon emissions from more than 190,000 metric tpy to zero. The reduction is the equivalent of taking more than 65,000 cars off the road every year (see article in Containerboard/Packaging section above). .
"This adds even more power to our sales message. Paperboard is widely seen as a very sustainable packaging material. By changing our energy source and upgrading Incada, we are now at the top of the folding box board market in terms of both product properties and sustainability," Lewis concludes.
The new Incada can be ordered this autumn with deliveries beginning in November.
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