PACKAGING PAPERBOARD
H
olmen Iggesund has been creating paperboard since 1963 and has been maintaining the forest
around its mill for centuries longer. The company owns more than 1.3 million hectares of forest in Sweden and each tree’s journey from seedling to paperboard is a century long. To ensure future supply of its Invercote, Incada and Inverform paperboards, Holmen Iggesund must respect the forest ecocycle. But what exactly does this entail? At 2022’s Luxe Pack Monaco, Johan Granås, Sustainability Director at Holmen Iggesund, gave members of the press a video tour of Holmen Iggesund’s forest and an inside look into responsible forest management. Cosmetics Business presents the highlights.
ON THE FOREST FLOOR “The objective or the purpose of the forestry that Holmen is doing is growing trees, which are 80 or 90 years old, that can become the timber for building houses, or furniture, or floors, or window frames,” Granås explained. “That’s why they are put here. We do more things with the wood as well, but the number one reason is we’re basically growing houses! And there’s a boom in this.
“The company was founded in 1685 and lots of the forest around here we’ve owned for 100 years or several hundred years even. “We have much more wood in the forest than we did 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago, thanks to more modern forestry standards; we take care of the forest better, so the trees grow better.
semi-natural forest is what we are trying to take care of.”
The company has owned local areas of forest for hundreds of years and has been creating paperboard since 1963
“Although geographically we don’t have that much more forest, within the forest itself we have much more wood. “These forests are considered
semi-natural forests, because, although you could walk around in them and feel that this is a natural forest, in fact, they have been harvested before. So they are not completely untouched. And this
Commenting on renewability, Granås gestured to an area earmarked to be harvested in future, but not in the near future, adding: “It will be harvested in ten, 20 or maybe even 30 years, when the older trees are mature enough.” He then contrasted this with a regenerated area, in which “the forest looks completely different; the trees are much, much smaller”.
He added: “This area was harvested about seven or eight years ago. We took down the trees here, made timber from them and so on. And then we have regenerated this area so that new forest comes up again. This is what ‘renewable’ really means, that we regenerate the forest.”
YELLING TIMBER: SO, WHERE DOES THE WOOD PULP GO?
Holmen Iggesund offers three brands of paperboard: Invercote Invercote is a strong, multi-layered solid bleached board that is suitable for a range of end-user applications including the packaging of premium cosmetics and perfumes. Incada
The Incada family of folding box board products is said to offer dependable packaging for a wide variety of designs and end-user applications including the packaging of cosmetics. Inverform Inverform is a solid bleached board with a natural feel that has been specifically designed for ready-made meal packaging such as pressed and deep-drawn trays.
36 January 2023
While Granås observed that “it’s obviously good business to make sure that we have raw material too for coming generations and coming periods”, he further noted that in Swedish law, from 1903, if you harvest an area of forest, you need to regenerate the forest. “Usually it’s done by planting seedlings in the ground by hand. And within two years the law forces you, after harvesting, to regenerate the forest. That’s what’s being done here. And that is being done everywhere in Sweden, because, as said, it’s good business.”
KNOWING YOUR HARVEST Moving further into the forest, Granås pointed out a stump of one of the trees
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