Stora Enso launches UltraThinPE for food service brands

The company aims to promote single-use paper cups

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Stora Enso launching its new innovation, UltraThinPE Tec, to reduce the use of the plastic coating in foodservice board
Stora Enso launching its new innovation, UltraThinPE Tec, to reduce the use of the plastic coating in foodservice board

UltraThinPE Tec is a new innovation from Stora Enso that significantly reduces the share of plastic coating in the foodservice Board (FSB) and applications such as single-use paper cups. With the help of UltraThinPE Tec, Stora Enso has developed the thinnest polymer coating for FSB products on the market. This achievement allows for paper cup designs with less than 5% plastic – an important step in helping packaging converters, brand-owners, and retailers meet their plastics reduction targets. The technology is presently used to produce UltraThinPE coatings for Stora Enso’s Cupforma product range for paper cups.

Paperboard material used for producing paper cups requires a barrier, commonly made from plastic, that offers both protection against liquid and functionality in converting. UltraThinPE Tec greatly improves the sustainability of paper cups by yielding the lowest plastic coating weight available on the market and reducing the overall carbon footprint of the finished product.

Stora Enso’s UltraThinPE Tec coatings are recyclable

UltraThinPE Tec reduces plastic coating weight by up to 40% when compared to Cupforma Natura products with 15 gram square meter PE (polyethylene) or renewable PE Green coatings (bio-based polyethylene), therefore enabling a share of greater than 95% paperboard. Achieving a plastic share of less than 5% helps brand-owners meet the composite threshold for packaging in some European countries. As a result, UltraThinPE Tec coatings can significantly reduce extended producer responsibility (EPR) fees by 75% in countries such as Germany.

FSB products with UltraThinPE Tec coatings can be recycled with paper or board depending on local regulations, collection, and sorting infrastructure. As one-sided, minimal-plastic coatings, they can also ease FSB recycling in standard recycling mills when combined with other paper and board packaging.

“By knowing the intended end-use of the product, like paper cups that will hold liquid for a short time, we can design coatings that use the absolute minimum material necessary. We do this by testing and verifying the exact amount needed for the end-user. UltraThinPE Tec enables brand-owners to meet their sustainability targets further, especially concerning plastics reduction, while maintaining the highest product hygiene and safety standards as in the case of paper cups,” said Tuomas Puonti, vice-president, head of Business Line LPB Fresh & FSB.

 

2023 promises an interesting ride for print in India

Indian Printer and Publisher founded in 1979 is the oldest B2B trade publication in the multi-platform and multi-channel IPPGroup. While the print and packaging industries have been resilient in the past 33 months since the pandemic lockdown of 25 March 2020, the commercial printing and newspaper industries have yet to recover their pre-Covid trajectory.

The fragmented commercial printing industry faces substantial challenges as does the newspaper industry. While digital short-run printing and the signage industry seem to be recovering a bit faster, ultimately their growth will also be moderated by the progress of the overall economy. On the other hand book printing exports are doing well but they too face several supply-chain and logistics challenges.

The price of publication papers including newsprint has been high in the past year while availability is diminished by several mills shutting down their publication paper and newsprint machines in the past four years. Indian paper mills are also exporting many types of paper and have raised prices for Indian printers. To some extent, this has helped in the recovery of the digital printing industry with its on-demand short-run and low-wastage paradigm.

Ultimately digital print and other digital channels will help print grow in a country where we are still far behind in our paper and print consumption and where digital is a leapfrog technology that will only increase the demand for print in the foreseeable future. For instance, there is no alternative to a rise in textbook consumption but this segment will only reach normality in the next financial year beginning on 1 April 2023.

Thus while the new normal is a moving target and many commercial printers look to diversification, we believe that our target audiences may shift and change. Like them, we will also have to adapt with agility to keep up with their business and technical information needs.

Our 2023 media kit is ready, and it is the right time to take stock and reconnect with your potential markets and customers. Print is the glue for the growth of liberal education, new industry, and an emerging economy. We seek your participation in what promises to be an interesting ride.

– Naresh Khanna

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