Uusi puu – The New Wood Project shows what wood can do. The project promotes wood-based innovations and provides information about them.
Walki®Natur Seal and Walki®Pack N are packaging materials that combine a protective natural polymer coating with a paper or paperboard base.
The environmental impact of plastics and the tightening EU legislation have caused the packaging industry to look for alternatives to fossil raw materials.
The EU’s Single-Use Plastics (SUP) Directive advocates a direction away from fossil-based plastics, and the recyclability requirement will be even stricter in the future Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation. The focus is being moved to fibre-based solutions from renewable sources and with efficient recycling systems.
Walki®Natur Seal and Walki®Pack N, developed by Walki, combine a wood-based raw material and a coating made of natural polymers. The end result is a plastics-free, recyclable and biodegradable packaging material which makes a suitable alternative to conventional single-use plastics.
The Walki packagings meet the requirements of the EU packaging waste legislation and are outside the scope of the SUP Directive. Companies using them will thus have fewer costs and a less need for reporting. According to Walki, the material offers an financially competitive option without extra expenditure or reporting obligations.
In concrete terms, the material consists of a paper or paperboard base coated with a layer of natural polymer. Thanks to this, the packaging is greaseproof and sealable, yet also recyclable as ordinary fibre waste.
If ending up in the environment, packagings made of Walki materials will decay without leaving a micro plastics residue. The share of wood-based materials in the product is over 90 percent, and the polymers used in it are made of sidestreams from the food and forest industries. This means that no new raw material from the forest is needed, resulting in a smaller carbon footprint.
Forest.fi and New Wood are initiatives of the Finnish Forest Association.