Gareth Fisher, sales director at James Cropper Paper & Packaging, discusses lessons learned from the firm’s 180 years of papermaking
THERE’S no substitute for experience.
It’s something that money can’t buy, but which has immense value to any business. And, as we at James Cropper celebrate our 180th anniversary, few businesses in any industry are in a position to draw on such a long, rich history of innovation.
While we’re proud of that legacy – and we’re still based on the same Lake District site first acquired by the Cropper family in 1845 – we aren’t defined by the past. Our roots go back to the days of the First Industrial Revolution, when the world was transformed forever by great innovators and pioneers, and so we’ve never lost sight of our identity as one of them.
Sharing lessons from the past
Today, when the global market is hungrier for material innovations than ever before, it’s important for us to share some of the lessons we’ve learned in our 180 years.
Businesses across the world are reducing their reliance on plastic materials in response to increasing pressure from consumers and legislators. This is having a significant impact on packaging and packaging materials – and, by extension, every industry that relies on them. The EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) strongly incentivises businesses to adopt packaging that is easier to recycle, imposing legally enforceable penalties on businesses that do not meet regularly increasing recycling targets. And a number of other regulators, including in the UK, China, and several states in the USA, are introducing extended producer responsibility (EPR) reforms that contain their own mechanisms targeted at reducing plastic use.
As plastic materials become less viable, paper materials represent the best option to replace them across many applications. The reasoning becomes clear when investigating material recycling statistics. Even in Europe, which is home to the most advanced recycling infrastructure on the planet, paper’s recycling figures dwarf those of plastic.
So, in a world where regulators increasingly demand more recyclable materials, it’s no surprise consumers and businesses alike have coalesced around paper as their material of choice. And for 180 years, James Cropper materials have been all around us – not just in packaging, but also in the air filters that clean the air we breathe, and in the jet engines of the aeroplanes that soar through our skies. That puts us in a unique position to keep pushing the envelope of papermaking, delivering paper materials that have all the attributes needed to replace plastic in an increasing number of applications.
Making a material difference
Our deep understanding of papercraft means we can help push paper recycling even further forward. For example, our CupCycling technology enables us to recycle up to 700 million coffee cups per year, overcoming persistent recyclability challenges stemming from the plastic barrier coatings used inside paper cups. Once these coatings are stripped from the paper cups, their paper fibres can be recycled and turned into high quality, food-grade paper products with a variety of applications, from stationery to packaging to more coffee cups.
And our long legacy of innovation means we can create new paper products using fibres sourced in even more unorthodox ways. It has informed our FibreBlend Upcycled Technology, which incorporates traditional virgin and recycled wood fibres alongside office waste, paper mill offcuts, and even worn denim fibres into paper materials that exceed expectations in both form and function.
Our experience tells us we are still only scratching the surface of what is possible when creating recycled and recyclable paper materials. The creation of Rydal Eco – a rigid uncoated box board that is made from 100% recycled fibre, yet which offers the brilliant whites and exceptional printing properties of coated board – is evidence of this.
This constant drive for innovation is as strong today as it was when we developed the world’s first coloured paper in 1856. And we’ll use it to lead the way into a brighter future.
Every great idea starts with two words: ‘What if?’
We’ve never stopped asking ‘what if?’, from the moment James Cropper himself asked “What if I bought my own mill?”
What if paper came in different colours? What if we could recycle coffee cups? What if we could upcycle old denim into premium paper?
All these questions were the starting point for some of our biggest innovations. And those two short words – ‘what if?’ – have been vital to our success. They’re only going to become even more important as the market landscape evolves.
That’s because those two words are the keys to a brighter, more circular future. They can set us on a path to overcoming problems that seem impossible. Look at the way the functionality of paper materials has advanced to the point where they can now be used for more sensitive packaging applications in the food and healthcare industries.
What if we could make paper materials even better, offering greater performance across an increasingly wide range of applications? What if we could reduce the need for plastic-based materials in applications where they are currently necessary, such as direct contact pharmaceutical packaging? What if all of this could be accomplished without compromising the recyclability of paper? Even after 180 years of innovation, we know there’s so much more left to accomplish. These ideas might sound impossible to some in the industry – but so did the idea of adding coloured dye to paper pulp back in 1856. It didn’t stop us innovating then, and it won’t now.
