Metsä Board boosts the development of new paperboard and packaging innovation in its new Excellence Centre

Growing consumption and demand for more sustainable packaging is boosting the need for new innovations. To develop solutions for packaging today and in the future, Metsä Board recently started operations in its new Excellence Centre at the unique bioeconomy site in Äänekoski, Finland. Among many state-of-the-art functions, the site also boasts a textile fibre demo plant.

The Excellence Centre opened its doors in autumn 2020 and covers a total of 1,500 square meters. It includes R&D facilities, a packaging design studio, a customer feedback centre and a state-of-the art laboratory providing more than 100 different measurement methods and analytics, all aiming to enable collaboration, co-creation, and innovation to explore future materials for packaging. The centre also features a virtual store and a computer-aided engineering (CAE) tool to allow sophisticated simulation and analysis of packaging performance.

Markku Leskelä, VP, Research and Product Development from Metsä Board says: “The Excellence Centre is perfectly aligned with the targets and topics of the Packaging Theme of the ExpandFibre. Besides enabling workshops with our customers, it is also a key facility for various projects with our partners and therefore it provides an excellent collaboration platform for the ExpandFibre ecosystem. Äänekoski will also be the site for the 3D fibre product pilot plant which is a joint effort by Metsä Group’s innovation company Metsä Spring and Valmet. The facility enables testing and further development of the novel process for producing of a new type of packaging solution.”