Iggesund calls on designers to improve packaging

IGGESUND Paperboard and American crowdsourcing firm Crowdspring are working together on a new project that invites designers worldwide to come up with new ideas for alternative packaging.

“Every day we all see examples of packaging that could be improved by a better choice of materials or a better design,” said Staffan Sjöberg, who is in charge of the project at Iggesund Paperboard. “Now we’re giving designers all over the world the chance to contribute their ideas on how to replace packaging made of glass, plastic or metal with solutions that use paperboard.”

This undertaking aims to find out how designers as a collective group envision sustainability in packaging. Mr Sjöberg pointed out that it is not about looking for inexpensive ideas for commercial use.

“We will not claim any commercial rights to the ideas that come in,” he said. “We’re just interested in getting a snapshot of how designers believe they can improve the packaging they see in the shops they visit on a daily basis. We want to publish the ideas and maybe reproduce some of them in physical form but we are not interested in exploiting them commercially.”

“This is an unusual reason for initiating a project with us,” commented Mike Samson, the coordinator from Crowdspring. “But we believe its combination of sustainability and innovative thinking will attract many of the thousands of designers listed in our database.”

Iggesund Paperboard is part of the Swedish forest industry group Holmen, one of the world’s 100 most sustainable industrial companies according to the UN Global Compact Index. Its annual turnover is about SEK 5bn (€525m).

The company’s product families are the Invercote (flagship product) and Incada. Since 2010 about SEK 3.3bn (€346m) has been invested by Iggesund to increase its energy efficiency and reduce the fossil carbon emissions from its paperboard mills.