A New Case for Paperboard Packaging?

One more question we need to ask and answer is: What has the bigger carbon footprint, packaging plants using paper and paperboard, or converters making packaging from plastic? In the summer 2008 issue of MediaPack, a publication linking the optical media industry with suppliers of packaging, Matti Koski, director of Stora Enso (the integrated paper, packaging, and forest products company) says the company has been researching this question for the last 10 years. Koski reports that the emissions necessary to manufacture the company’s own paperboard sleeve design for CD packaging are 10 percent of the footprint required for producing the standard jewel case. In addition, pulp mills are energy-producing, not energy-consuming. Whatever isn’t needed to make paper or board is converted into power. “It’s bioenergy,” Koski says. “It doesn’t use fossil fuels.”4