askralph

Chuck Asks —

We are having increasing difficulty in obtaining combined board with 26# medium from integrated and independent converters as well as sheet plants for a major customer of ours. The issue is this customer uses a lot of DOT/UN boxes. We have stressed the need for them to convert from 23 to 26 based on industry trends and the resulting availability or lack of it. With the amount of SKU’s and all of the required testing, this customer is facing considerable costs. They are not opposed to moving in that direction but they are requiring some authoritative documentation to justify these costs.

Do you know where we can get our hands on some statistics regarding how much 26# is produced versus 23# and what the annual trends have been? I realize this is not strictly a technical question but as stated above, I figured you could point me in the right direction.

Below 26# medium constitutes about 35% of the market and 26# about 24% of all US medium production. Lightweight mediums and packaging volumes are much higher in Europe.

—Ralph

This entry was posted on January 18, 2012 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Containerboard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.