Replacing single-use plastics

The growing number of campaigns to ban plastic waste are putting pressure on companies to find alternatives – not just for straws, but for all kinds of plastic packaging. So BillerudKorsnäs tests out products they hope to sell in the budding market for plastic replacements.

Some of their customers now use cardboard instead of clear plastic packaging for camping gear, and paper bags instead of plastic ones for food like pasta. The lab is even working on a paper soda bottle, which Tor Lundqvist, head of the company's Americas division, calls a "fly to the moon kind of thing."

BillerudKorsnäs is primarily a paper company that prides itself on its sustainably managed forests. It also has a process — the details of which it won't divulge — that it says produces super strong paper.

"We can use these products in solutions where they can actually push out plastic for plastic bags, for instance, or plastic trays," Lundqvist says.

At the company's lab in Portland, designers slide a laptop with their paper end caps into a box. They're testing to see if the paper can match the protective power of plastic.

First, a mechanical arm drops the laptop 3 feet. Then, a shaking machine mimics the bumps on a delivery truck. Finally, another machine squeezes it between two metal arms. After all that, there are no dents in the box and no damage to the laptop. That could one day mean more customers for the company, and more laptops getting packaged and shipped plastic-free.

https://www.npr.org/2018/11/04/660299276/beyond-plastic-bans-creating-products-to-replace-it