Finnish food and beverage company Paulig is testing UPM BioVerno naphtha, made from tall oil, as a raw material for its packaging. The first test batch with Paulig Café New York has been successfully packed and released to market.
UPM BioVerno is produced from tall oil, a residue of pulp making, in the UPM Lappeenranta Biorefinery. In the new laminate tested over the half of the material used in the Paulig coffee packs is tall oil-based.
“We are committed to replacing fossil-based raw materials with renewable ones. Paulig’s initiative to use our wood-based UPM BioVerno as a raw material in the laminates of their coffee packs is a further step towards creating more circular and sustainable packaging,” says Panu Routasalo, Vice President of UPM Biofuels.
Paulig has ambitious climate targets, approved by the UN’s Science Based Targets initiative. By 2030 Paulig will reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from its own operations by 80% and its value chain by 50%. Paulig will also switch to using only packages that are recyclable and made from renewable or recycled materials by 2030.
“Recyclability is currently our focus and we also look for feasible solutions for renewable or recycled packaging materials. Even though the carbon footprint of the products comes mainly from the product itself and packaging plays a small role, all these improvements in the packaging contribute to the circularity and climate target of the value chain. If the tests prove to be successful, our target is to replace so called first generation biobased materials in coffee vacuum packs with tall oil-based material, which is a residue from the forest industry,” says Kati Randell, Strategic Packaging Development Manager at Paulig.
At the Vuosaari roastery Paulig produces 100 million coffee packs a year. The roastery building’s emissions have been reduced by 98% since 2014, and the remaining emissions have been offset through carbon finance projects.
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