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McDonald’s Japan Scraps Paper Straws

Sustainable Energy Management with the Maflex Energy Regenerative System

Voith and Wuzhou Specialty Paper Successfully Start Up First DuoCentri NipcoFlex Press with Center Belt

Following the contract announced in 2025, Voith has successfully started up PM 19 at Wuzhou Specialty Paper. The paper machine is the first worldwide to operate with Voith’s DuoCentri NipcoFlex press with center belt. The solution has now moved from development to commercial operation and has already demonstrated stable production and reliable web runnability.

Ovoko Cuts eCommerce Packaging Costs for Car Bumpers by Up to 42% with Mondi

Large, fragile automotive parts pose a unique challenge for eCommerce businesses. When Ovoko, a leading online marketplace for car parts, needed a smarter, safer and more cost-efficient way to ship its products, Mondi’s team partnered with them to design a tailored heavy duty packaging solution. 

AFT Expands its Offering with the Launch of MaxPulping System for Recycled Fiber Processing

Aikawa Fiber Technologies (AFT) is pleased to announce the launch of MaxPulping™, AFT’s new pulping system designed for recycled paper and board processing. With MaxPulping, AFT further strengthens its presence across the papermaking process by offering a complete pulping solution that includes core equipment, wear parts, and related services.

Voith Launches InfibraDeflaker to Advance Efficient and Flexible Stock Preparation

Voith has introduced the InfibraDeflaker, a new deflaking solution designed to meet the increasing demands of modern stock preparation and wet end process. As part of the BlueLine portfolio, the InfibraDeflaker focuses on operational flexibility, resource efficiency and ease of maintenance while ensuring reliable fiber processing across a wide range of applications.

Voith Introduces EcoCal HiBulk – a New Approach to Bulk Saving Calendering for Board Producers

Voith has launched EcoCal HiBulk, a new calendering solution designed to help board producers reduce fiber consumption while maintaining surface quality and mechanical strength. The technology has been successfully tested under production conditions at a leading European papermaker and marks an important step forward in bulk-saving calendering.

A systems approach for process debottlenecking towards a sustainable pulp and paper industry, TAPPI Journal April 2026

ABSTRACT: Increasing the competitiveness of the pulp and paper industry requires an effective optimization of its existing assets in line with a long-term vision for process transformation, production upgrade, and product diversification. Currently, pulp production increase is one of the main sources of additional revenue for the kraft industry. Likewise, energy efficiency is often employed as a cost-effective approach to reduce operating costs, enhancing the possibilities to lower fossil fuel consumption and contributing to a low-carbon economy. On the other hand, reaching higher production targets and facilitating process transformation, such as biorefinery implementation, heavily depend on the status and performance of a mill’s current infrastructure; therefore, a system analysis is needed to assess the new production requirements, the bottlenecks, and the interactions across departments. In order to obtain practical improvement solutions, direct and indirect impacts on process performance and resource utilization should be considered. This work provides an overview of the key challenges that need to be addressed for production increase and energy efficiency improvement. The methodology starts by a scope analysis for debottlenecking and screening capacity limitations vs. mill targets, followed by their ranking (bottleneck ranking diagram). Benchmarking, gap analysis, and root-cause techniques are applied to diagnose system inefficiencies. This mill-wide debottlenecking assessment is then used to guide the selection of a long-term sustainable operation and design a portfolio of improvement projects by avoiding cross effects of the short-term projects on the long term. A case study of a kraft pulp mill is used to illustrate the proposed methodology.

Adhesion with purpose: The value of primers in sustainable flexible packaging, TAPPI Journal July 2025

ABSTRACT: Primers play a crucial role in flexible packaging by providing adhesion, enhancing performance, and improving the overall quality of packaging structures. As the packaging industry shifts towards more sustainable solutions, it brings new challenges for meeting adhesion requirements. Different types of sustainable materials, with their complicated physical and chemical properties, usually result in poor adhesion in extrusion coating or extrusion lamination, whether this is due to fast crystallization, secondary crystallization, low processing temperature, lack of functional groups, or a combination thereof. Water-based primers ensure that these innovations meet both functional and environmental standards for the packaging of tomorrow. Conventional water-based primers, including polyethyleneimine (PEI) and ethylene acrylic acid (EAA), offer significant advantages in sustainable packaging design by chemically modifying the surface of the substrate to enhance adhesion. In this study, we will discuss adhesion issues in three case studies involving sustainable packaging materials: (1) extrusion coating of polyvinyl alcohol (PVOH) on paper; (2) extrusion lamination of paper and metallized film with starch biopolymer; and (3) extrusion coating of polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) on paper. These cases represent three adhesion challenges related to sustainable materials, namely fast crystallization rate, low processing temperature, and secondary crystallization. A three-step adhesion improvement procedure was employed to identify the proper primer in each case study. This procedure included a wetting-out test with primer, an adhesion test, and an extrusion test with priming. In our results, strong fiber tearing or destructive bonds were achieved in each case with the help of water-based primers. These results demonstrate the value of water-based primers in enabling the transition to more sustainable packaging structures without compromising performance.

Improving paper wet strength via increased lignin content and hot-pressing temperature, TAPPI JOURNAL October 2020

ABSTRACT: It is known that the strength properties of wood-based paper materials can be enhanced via hot-pressing techniques. Today, there is a desire not only for a change from fossil-based packaging materials to new sustainable bio-based materials, but also for more effective and eco-friendly solutions for improving the dry and wet strength of paper and board. Against this background, hot pressing of paper made from high yield pulp (HYP), rich in lignin, becomes highly interesting. This study investigated the influence of pressing temperature and native lignin content on the properties of paper produced by means of hot pressing. Kraft pulps of varied lignin content (kappa numbers: 25, 50, 80) were produced at pilot scale from the same batch by varying the cooking time. We then studied the effect of lignin content by evaluating the physical properties of Rapid Köthen sheets after hot pressing in the temperature range of 20°C•200°C with a constant nip pressure of 7 MPa. The pilot-scale cooked pulps were compared with reference samples of mill-produced northern bleached soft-wood kraft (NBSK) pulp and mill-produced chemithermomechanical pulp (CTMP).Generally, the results demonstrated that lignin content had a significant effect on both dry and wet tensile index. All of the pilot cooked pulps with increased lignin content had a higher tensile index than the reference NBSK pulp. To obtain high tensile index, both dry and wet, the pressing temperature should be set high, preferably at least 200°C; that is, well above the glass transition temperature (Tg) for lignin. Moreover, the lignin content should prefera-bly also be high. All kraft pulps investigated in this study showed a linear relationship between wet strength and lignin content.