You might not have heard of the Finland-based company Metsä Board, but you almost certainly will have come into contact with its products. Millions of packages made of Metsä Board’s paperboard are delivered each and every day worldwide.
Metsä Board’s success has not gone unnoticed. The company has earned itself an enviable reputation as a leader in sustainability, and has recently made it into the Financial Times Climate Leaders 2021 list, having cut its greenhouse gas emissions by more than 40% in just five years.
And its commitment to developing new sustainable packaging solutions doesn’t end there. Following an almost insatiable demand for the fast fulfilment of innovative products from customers across consumer packaged goods, retail and pharmaceutical industries, Metsä Board decided it needed to up its game.
How does Metsä Board design and create sustainable packaging?
Metsä Board designs and creates sustainable packaging through a combination of innovative design, responsible material sourcing, and advanced simulation capabilities. Starting with an understanding of the customer’s needs and requirements and optimizing material and design solutions through the 3DEXPERIENCE, Metsä Board extends the commitment to sustainability to its material sourcing by using only fresh fiber from sustainably managed forests, implementing a closed-loop system for water and waste and ensuring its products are fully recyclable and biodegradable.
“We quickly came to realize that we needed to accelerate our rate of innovation to stay ahead of the competition,” said Markku Leskelä, Metsä Board’s Vice President of Research and Product Development. “We felt the traditional way of optimizing material and design solutions for packaging took too much time. We had to physically make a prototype design, which then had to be transported to be tested. Based on the test results, we would then recommend the paperboard and maybe also adapt the design and the process would start again.”
Leskelä was very aware that modeling and simulation technologies could bring a new way of working to his team, but it took some time to find a good solution.
But Leskelä then discovered a platform that could provide innovative 3D simulation capabilities from a single, centralized location.
Using this platform, Metsä Board can now test an almost infinite number of applications of its products, and incredibly fast. It is also able to simulate more complicated end use cases and situations, such as behavior under compression loading, transport vibration tests, drop test simulations, secondary packaging in the context of primary packaging and more.
Read more here to discover how Metsä Board is using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to not only do all of this, but to build an entirely new offering for its customers that sees it achieve the optimal between strength, size and performance of its packaging designs.
Lindsay James is a freelance journalist and copywriter with over 20 years' writing experience. She is a regular contributor to Dassault Systèmes' Compass magazine.