ColdCor-flex: A cold corrugating process enabling a disruptive business model for sheet converters and box makers with significantly reduced carbon footprint, capital and operating costs.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Legacy manufacturing approaches for the production of corrugated board are hugely wasteful of energy and water. They are also extremely capital intensive, and lack the flexibility required to meet the complex demands of modern B2B and retail supply chains.With increasing overall demand from online retail, the cardboard market is growing by a CAGR of 4.4%. However, due to the capital and operating cost burden of existing manufacturing technology, sheet converters (corrugated packaging producers) are limited to a very few suppliers, themselves wedded to use of the largest format paper feedstock, and unable to offer their customers less-than full lorry load quantities at cost effective prices. With existing board producers thinly distributed, the environmental and economic cost of storage, and shipping a board product, consisting of ~50% air, sometimes 100s of miles is not sustainable. These cumbersome legacy technologies lack the flexibility to meet today's customer demands efficiently, cost effectively and with minimal environmental impact.We have developed to prototype stage a revolutionary corrugator technology which requires no process water, uses significantly less energy, occupies much less space and requires a fraction of the existing capital expenditure. Where before a sheet converter could never contemplate the flexibility of on-site board manufacture, with the Interpac corrugator, ColdCor-Flex**,** cost-effective and flexible production of board can now become a reality. In order to develop our solution to a pre-production prototype for demonstration to stakeholders, we have some key technical challenges to overcome.With a long-standing relationship, the two partners of the project have assembled a strong team to deliver this carefully planned work. Total costs for the 18-month project are budgeted at £475,031 of which we are requesting £332,521 of grant funding. The project will output prototype drying and corrugating technology, installed on our existing pilot line, together with the results of board and box testing, and a formal impacts and benefits analysis