New grades pour out of the mills
By Peter N. Williamson,Editor

This spring has seen the appearance of reams and reams of new palettes of color and new surface treatments for paper. A few examples will give a good idea of what’s been happening.

Wausau Papers launched a 100-lb cover stock in its Royal Linen® line of premium textured papers. It’s acid free and available in four colors. A few days later it added Astrobrights® Textures, a 104-lb textured cover stock. Heavyweight, acid-free, lignin-free and chlorine-free, it’s also a four-color range. It’s tone-on-tone with a hammered appearance.

SMART Papers calls its new Kromekote Candy Collection with 30% post-consumer waste content “a new environ-mental standard for high-end coated papers,” with new deep colors, mirrored foils, metallics and pearls for a diverse selection of cast-coated papers. There’s a new swatchbook, too.

It’s most encouraging to see this innovation in an industry that’s forever being told it’s over the hill. Several companies have programs to help particular customers. Glatfelter just announced Performance Plus to meet the unique needs of the book publisher. The program offers “a select group of the top-of-
the-line Glatfelter book papers easily and quickly.”

Neenah Paper has a graphic competition “Design for the Environment Contest” aimed at designers who have worked for non-profit environmental organizations using Neenah’s ENVIRONMENT® or other uncoated paper with recycled fiber. Sappi’s “Life with Print” brand campaign looks at the importance of print in our lives and acts as an advocate for the print industry.

The distributors are in on the act, too. To celebrate Earth Day, April 22, OfficeMax gave away free samples of its MaxBrite® premium recycled copy paper to the first 100 customers at each location nation-wide as well as free reams of recycled paper to shoppers who recycled cell phones and used toner cartridges.

Even paperboard gets a look in: The Paperboard Packaging Alliance has released the results of a study that show-cases the value associated with paper-board packaging. Suddenly, paper’s taken on a new aura. Let’s hope the industry builds on it. PI.

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