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Corrugated
board is made from a renewable source, is paper based,
environmentally friendly, fully recyclable and fully bio-degradable. It is generally made of three
pieces of paper bonded together with a starch adhesive and with the
middle layer of paper being corrugated (fluted) which gives the end
product its strength. The three most common types of corrugated are
"Open Face" board where there is one layer of paper, on top of
which a fluted paper is put. Secondly, "Single Wall"
corrugated, which is a board made from an inner paper, a fluting and an
outer paper. Thirdly, there is "Double Wall" corrugated board, which as
its names suggests, is made up from two single walls. There are 3 paper
liners between which is sandwiched, two sets of fluting.
To see some key dates in the history of corrugated
manufacture,
click here.
Various types of papers are
produced by paper mills for the manufacture of corrugated. Virgin paper,
produced from wood pulp is called Kraft Liner.
This comes in brown, white or off-white (mottled) and in various paper
thickness'. This paper contains up to 12% waste material. Kraft liner
is usually used on the outside of the corrugated. What is referred to as
Test-liner is a paper made up from 100% recycled paper, (usually from
recycled virgin boxes, newspaper waste etc). This too comes in different thickness'
and is usually used as the inside liner, or inside paper of the box. It can be referred to as "TL" or "TL2". Papers are usually manufactured in
varying Thickness' going generally from 125, to 150, to 175, to 200, to
300 gsm (grammes per square metre). Thus if you have a corrugated ’board
grade’ such as 200K/200T ’B’, what this means is the outer liner is
200gsm weight Brown Kraft, the inner liner is 200gsm weight Test-liner and
the fluting is standard 105 gsm weight ’B’ flute. Board grades
can be described in many ways, but the common terminology is to describe the weight and colour of the outer liner, followed by the weight and colour of the inner liner, followed by the fluting. The picture above centre left shows a cross section of a typical piece of
'single wall' board.
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The
'fluting’ or 'corrugating' is what gives
corrugated cardboard its strength. There are generally five types of fluting
(see above left). Generally, ‘F’ Flute, or Fine Flute and ‘E’ Flute tend to
be used in smaller boxes, and retail packs. Whereas ‘B’ flute is the
most commonly used fluting in general packing boxes of all kinds. ‘C’
Flute is stronger than ‘B’ flute and is used in boxes where
additional wall strength is needed. When you combine ‘B’ and ‘C’
you can make "Double Wall" boxes. A’ Flute is the thickest
flute of all and when combined with say ‘C’ flute in a double wall combination, will make an extremely strong pack that can hold in excess of
1,000 kilo's.
People describe corrugated packaging in a
number of ways, for example: cardboard boxes, cardboard cases, corrugated cases,
cardboard packaging, corrugated boxes, corrugated packaging and so on.
All these phrases refer to the same thing. To see the designs we can
produce, click on the various FEFCO codes on the menu at top of page. |
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