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Collaborations Expand Paper Packaging’s Potentials

“Imagine that all plastic packaging in your store one day has disappeared, and eventually all glass bottles and metal cans; that all packages are made of renewable materials that can be recycled or returned to nature without harm.”

Ben Miyares

That is the bold, aspirational vision of the Paper Bottle Co. (Paboco). But is it realistic? Are packages made of “materials that can be recycled or returned to nature without harm” part of what management consultant McKinsey & Co. calls the “next normal”? If there’s an “after next normal” we’ll probably have to wait till then, in our view.

Paboco is a joint venture started in 2019 by Swedish paper packaging material developer BillerudKorsnäs and Austrian plastic bottle blow molder, Alpla Group. The JV is expanding beverage bottling reality by offering 330mL and 500mL molded fiber bottles with recycled PET (rPET), polyethylene furanoate (PEF) or polyethylene naphthalate (PEN) barrier film coatings. Carlsberg, the Danish brewer, and Coca-Cola have expressed enough interest in the development to test Paboco’s concept.

Riding a crest of popularity, the sustainability of paper—already the most widely used packaging materials— has it inching its way from boxes and cartons into prototypical non-angular bottles, a format dominated to date by glass and plastic.

Propelled by growing e-commerce sales, marketplace regulations, technological advances in materials and machinery, consumer preferences, and environmental concerns—particularly those targeting plastics—paper is approaching the brink of making some market-transforming changes in the packaging landscape. Collaborative efforts are fueling many of the changes.


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