How Is Cardboard Manufactured?
Cardboard is inexpensive to make, which makes it an ideal way to package and ship products. Other uses include furniture, and even prefab houses. The long, strong fibers used to make cardboard enable it to be recycled several times.
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Raw Materials
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Pine trees are the main raw material used in the making of cardboard. They grow fast, and packaging companies own thousands of acres devoted to the growing and harvesting of them. The limbs are stripped and the trunks sent to a pulp mill. Recycled materials are also used.
The Kraft process
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Carl F. Dahl perfected a paper-making process he called the Kraft process, from the German word Kraft, which means strong. Tree trunks are torn into small pieces, and put in a batch digester, which is a high-pressure tank that dissolves the lignin, which binds the wood fibers. The fibers are cleaned and refined, then sent through a Fourdrinier machine used to make paper.
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Corrugating
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A corrugating machine is typically 300 feet long. The machine uses heavy rollers to corrugate the paper. First are the preheating rollers, then the corrugating rollers, which are covered with flutes, or ridges that bend the paper into corrugated cardboard.
Gluing
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Corrugated cardboard is sandwiched between 2 Kraft paper liners. The single facer glue station uses a set of rollers and starch glue to attach a Kraft paper liner. The second liner is installed with another set of rollers called the double backer glue station, also using starch glue.
box blanks
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Large sheets of cardboard, called box blanks are cut from corrugated cardboard using a slitter-scorer. The box blanks are sent through a machine called a flexo, short for flexographic machine, which produce a finished product, such as a box.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit the cardboard goffered image by Alexander Ivanov from Fotolia.com
