The New Wood competition 2025: Wood-based foam challenges plastic padding materials for protecting breakable items
Uusi puu – The New Wood Project shows what wood can do. The project promotes wood-based innovations and provides information about them.
The new wood-based Papira® material by Stora Enso provides a solution for packaging breakable items without using fossil raw materials.
Replacing plastics in packaging materials with renewable solutions has become a widely shared goal in society. In Europe, less than a third of all plastic waste ends up being recycled, while the corresponding figure for paper and paperboard materials is over 80 percent.
Foam materials made of plastics, such as bubble wraps and plastic foams, have long dominated the protective packaging of breakable items. However, they cause a heavy burden for the environment because of their fossil raw materials, poor recyclability and large carbon footprint. To solve the problem, the forestry company Stora Enso has developed a new material called Papira®.
Papira® is a fully bio-based packaging foam, whose principal raw material is cellulose fibre. The product replaces fossil-based protective materials, offering a similar light weight and shock absorbency without the use of plastics.
In practice, Papira® corresponds to conventional plastic padding materials used in packaging: it can be cut to the desired shape and placed to protect the item during transport. The only differences are the origin and life span of the material: Papira® is biodegradable and can be recycled as paperboard. According to Stora Enso, the fibre used in the material comes from responsibly managed forests, and no dangerous chemicals are used in the production process.
Stora Enso says that the carbon footprint of the Papira® manufacturing process is up to 70 percent smaller than with conventional plastic foams. In addition, fibre-based materials can be recycled as many as 20 times or even more, which also makes them a long-term solution from the perspective of national economy.
Forest.fi and New Wood are initiatives of the Finnish Forest Association.