The New Wood competition 2025: Advent calendar leads the way to plastic-free seasonal products
Uusi puu – The New Wood Project shows what wood can do. The project promotes wood-based innovations and provides information about them.
Made by Grano of cartonboard from MM Kotkamills for the Forsman Tee tea company, the advent calendar contains no other additional materials. The components of the plastics-free calendar are easy to recycle or even re-use.
Many seasonal items – and particularly advent calendars – are designed to be used just once. This makes it even more important to produce them as responsibly and ecologically as possible.
Using cartonboard by MM Kotkamills Boards Oy, Grano Oy designed an advent calendar for the Forsman Tee speciality teas company that is completely plastics-free and easy to recycle. The aim was to serve both tea lovers and sustainability.
Every component of the calendar, including the tea boxes, is made of Finnish ALASKA® BRIGHT folding boxboard, suitable for food packagings.
The numbered little boxes contain different teas packed in pyramidal bags, and the boxes also act as doors for the calendar.
The boxes can be re-used, perhaps given to children to play with, and after use the whole calendar can easily be recycled in cartonboard stream. The well-thought-out visual design is by Anna Polkutie from Lieka Oy and Antti Kurvinen from Grano Oy.
The material is notable for its high-quality printability, enabling an eye-catching visual design. Made of primary fibre, the cartonboard contains no fluorine-based compounds. After use, it can be recycled to make new paper or cartonboard products.
According to MM Kotkamills, the Finnish-made advent calendar is an example of how traditional seasonal items can be made more eco-friendly, without compromising the consumer experience or visual appeal.
Forest.fi and New Wood are initiatives of the Finnish Forest Association.