Uusi puu – The New Wood Project shows what wood can do. The project promotes wood-based innovations and provides information about them.
Woamy produces completely plastics-free and recyclable packaging foams out of cellulose fibres.
The foam plastics used in packaging are a problem for the environment. They are non-biodegradable, and are made of non-renewable raw materials with processes that are a burden on the environment.
Foam plastics are also extremely difficult to recycle. Being lightweight, they are easily caught in the wind and end up directly in the environment, including the seas, and so contribute to the global plastics waste problem. It has been estimated that up to 90 percent of the plastics debris in the seas consists of fossil-based foam plastics.
Woamy has developed a fully plastics-free, non-toxic foam for the packaging market, using cellulose fibre. The invention imitates the longitudinal direction of wood, which makes the foam not only strong, but also lightweight. It can be used to replace both rigid and elastic packaging foams.
The biofoam is versatile in use due to being soft and dust-free. Woamy already uses it in packagings for high-end products, such as design lamps, or luxury brands, such as perfumes. The material is easily tailored according to brand and product, and the story they have to tell.
’To begin with, Woamy does focus on the premium segment, but the biofoam technology has the potential to revolutionize the entire foam industry, to reduce the environmental burden from foam plastic waste and its volume on both land and sea, and to support consumers aiming at responsible consumption,’ Woamy says.
In collaboration with the Pack Age course at Aalto University, a foam filler for high-quality whisky tumblers was made from Woamy’s biofoam. The tumbler is designed by Slate Grove, and the packaging by the students of the Pack Age course at Aalto University: Nea Paavola, Prem Sankaran, Jenni Rimpiläinen, Matleena Liukkonen and Sara Spadinger. The work was led by Senior University Lecturer Markus Joutsela.
The foam filler in the paperboard packaging was embossed with a tailored pattern resembling wood grain, and the foam was also impregnated with an appropriate scent. The packaging was selected for the Green Award contest at the Paris LuxePack Edition Speciale exhibition, and as part of the Cooler Planet exhibition at the Helsinki Design Week.
From the perspectives of consumer and the environment, the biofoam works best as a filler in cardboard packagings. In this case, all packaging material is made of wood pulp, and the outer packaging and the foam can both be recycled as paperboard.
The only sidestream of the process is steam, which can be recycled back into the process which reduces the total energy need of the production.
