Mondi scores recycled paper at Sustainable Packaging News awards and further contributes to a circular economy

Transcendia, a leader in manufacturing and converting specialty films is excited to announce it is breaking ground on a 52,000 square foot manufacturing expansion at its Hebron, OH location as part of its ongoing commitment to investing in barrier film technologies. The new building will be equipped with additional multilayer blown and cast film lines, specialty converting equipment and a new testing lab dedicated to supporting new barrier applications in the food, pharmaceutical and industrial film markets. Upon completion, the Hebron, OH facility, with its ISO 9001:2015 certified quality systems, SQF certification and class 7 clean room capabilities, will have a total footprint of 84,000 square feet. The new building will complement existing barrier extrusion capabilities, including Transcendia’s most recent seven-layer blown film asset capable of producing films up to 78” wide with thicknesses between 1.0 – 10.0 mil. In addition to multiple asset investments, Transcendia will be adding to its application and process engineering team to provide additional technology resources for customers’ new application development. To support the expansion and 24/7 operation, Transcendia will hire approximately 36 new associates including machine operators, material handlers, maintenance technicians and supervisors.

Performa Light CarbonZero™ by Stora Enso is the first carbon neutral cartonboard offer in the market. It helps Stora Enso’s customers to have a smaller climate impact. Performa Light CarbonZero is a carbon neutral, renewable and recyclable cartonboard offering that helps Stora Enso’s customers to achieve carbon-related sustainability targets and show concrete and measurable actions on climate change through their packaging. Performa Light CarbonZero is produced at Stora Enso’s Fors site in Sweden, which is fossil carbon emission-free in its electricity and steam production and from the beginning of 2022 also in internal logistics. This is a result of continuous work and investments in improving the operations. The production is therefore already very low on greenhouse gas emissions. To make Performa Light CarbonZero carbon neutral, the currently unavoidable emissions originating from raw material production are compensated with a well-established offsetting service provided by external partner South Pole.

Metsä Group’s innovation company Metsä Spring and Valmet have decided to continue the development collaboration related to 3D fibre products and hence, to invest jointly approximately EUR 20 million in a new R&D project. As part of the project, a greenfield pilot plant will be built on Metsä Group’s mill site in Äänekoski, Finland. When operational, the pilot plant will employ roughly 10 persons. The technology applied in the pilot plant converts wet wood pulp into final 3D fibre products without any intermediate steps. In other words, the new environmentally-friendly 3D fibre products are ready to be shipped to end customers as such. “Our objective is to develop a novel wood-based 3D fibre product, which can replace, for instance, packages made out of fossil raw materials. The pre-study phase with Valmet was a success. We have thus decided to accelerate the pace of development by constructing a pilot plant. I believe that our possibilities for developing a new significant added-value product for the Finnish forest industry are good”, says Jarkko Tuominen, head of the project at Metsä Spring.