Miniflute has been steadily gaining market share from traditional folding cartons for the last few years. It's popular today with the wine industry, specialty foods, and point-of-purchase displays, and is slowly making its way into cosmetics and drugs. High compression strength and improved graphic quality have changed miniflute perceptions, and put pressure on folding-carton manufacturers to use the material or seek alternatives. Unfortunately, some folding-carton machines can't run miniflute sheets, or manufacturers find them too expensive.

Paperboard manufacturers recognize that the bulk of the folding-carton industry use clay-coated recycled boxboard or bleached board: on the low end, for cartons for cereal and food staples; and on the high end for high-quality tobacco and cosmetics cartons. To fight miniflutes, new grades can now be offered for strength at high speeds and heavy ink coverage, brightness and whiteness for high impact and snappy graphics, and smoothness for quality reproduction using both offset and flexo printing.

Matching the end user's demands to your machinery's capabilities is key to successful job completion and delivery of carton specifications. Converters have used fully bleached, bright white paperboards for high quality packages for 100 years. In the last 20 years, software and toy companies used graphic boards to provide value to their products via packaging. As a result, the amount of bleached paperboard has climbed steadily from about 4 million tons in 1980, to 5.7 million tons in 1990 and about 7 million tons in 2000. Bleached bristols, used for airline tickets and post cards, add another 1.5 million tons. Folding cartons consume over 50% of the total production, while milk and juice cartons claim around 40%.

The rest is split up between linerboard applications and other litho-lam converting operations. Unfortunately, the economy's recent weakness will reduce production, but capacity is likely to remain around 7.5 million tons. Recycled boxboard production in USA has gained dramatically, too, over the past 20 years, to over 15 million tons.

Corporate accounts like Tropicana and Florida's Best consume big portions of the producers' output, while local milk producers take on smaller, but in sum, large amounts of stock. The fastest growing segment is high-end packaging.

Choosing between standard 32- to 26-in. machinery and new, more costly 22-in. machines should also involve substrate costs and consideration. Not all webs will run on narrow as well as standard widths, and caliper and surface variations make selection even more critical to hitting the ROI target. Paper coats are likely to remain around 12%-15% of total costs, but using the right stock could keep costs to the low end.

Narrow webs for smaller packages like retail drugs and starter cosmetics can be tricky in terms of paperboard application. Usually coverage is very heavy and deep shades seem to be the norm, requiring stock with superior smoothness and surface strength to avoid smearing and misregister. Double and triples coatings of coated one-side (C1S) should be sought, along with anecdotal and technical information on reduced cracking at the fold and crease. Standard long runs have demands that are far more tied to strength parameters, like tear and tensile, which most mills have solved with fiber selection. Brightness and whiteness, gloss and other optics, along with weight, are the primary pricing influences.

To combat the miniflute market, Westvaco has produced a grade called Forte, which is less expensive yet provides graphic quality and strength. Forte is a 36 pt. solid fiberboard with a coated face stock. In effect, the board is equal or greater than compression targets of F, G and N flutes, but with a top sheet of 85 GE brightness. The key to realizing the cost reduction is speed and less waste along the process (press, die cut, folder/gluer), simply because Forte is run like any other sheet (or roll), just with greater strength.

The biggest producer in North America, International Paper, is also making new products to fit narrow-web markets, even to replace plastic. Its well-known Everest grade recently replaced plastic in a pharmaceutical application.

Cascades' new acquisition of Paperboard Industries is yielding new products lately with their new ArctiKote, a C2S board available in six weights, in rolls and sheets. Like its Canadian cousin Tembec, it also uses short fibers, but is combined with recycled fibers and virgin kraft. The low-density, three-ply board is targeted at the litho-lam markets, where two sided printing and high permeability is required.

Michael J. Ducey

Consulting Technical Editor

415/928-7297

paperinfo@excite.com