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Performance comparison of paper and plastic sacks: Mark Van Der Merwe, Billerud Korsnas (Sweden)

Filmed at Cemtech Asia 2015, 21-24 June, Grand Hyatt, Bangkok, Thailand

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I'm going to in the next 20-30 minutes take you on a journey, this journey will involve six movies. I'm going to share many interesting facts with you, I'll introduce some new ideas, I'll also leave you with some thoughts that hopefully you will be contemplating after the congress and I'll also introduce you to a new concept which we call quick for clean and it is a concept that we believe will solve some of the problems that we experience in the cement industry with the current and conventional packaging.

This journey is also about improving lives and of course our businesses, we have to be pragmatic about these things it's not all about painting everything green and making it look good, it certainly about making money and that is what we focus on as well. I don't have anybody in the audience here who was in Bangkok two weeks ago, apparently there was a huge storm and then alot of flooding, parts of the city were shut down, the traffic came to a stand still and there was a little bit of chaos in the city.

Two reasons for this one of course is the lot of water falling out of the sky, the other reason was the plastic pollution blocking at the drains. Now plastic is a wonderful material, I use alot of it myself, we cannot live without plastics, certainly not and it's a very durable material, but there's a draw back to this durability in that the material lasts for thousands of years and when it lands in our rivers it, lands up in the sea and eventually it ends up in what they call the Great Pacific garbage patch which is this area in North Pacific where there is a circular current and all this plastic, all this pollution that we throw into the water ends up there and keeps going in one big circle and collecting and collecting.

But I want to go back abit and we need to talk about why we use packaging. Packaging is very important, they say the best packaging is no packaging and certainly I agree with that, people want to move towards bulk packaging and that makes sense, but in the interim we said we do need to use packaging and we use it to transport products from point A to point B. We also use it to identify and communicate and that's very important for those of you who want to stand out from the crowd, who want to improve your branding, not only do you put the name of the cement on the packaging, you also tell the customer what type of cement it is and you communicate information to him about the hazards and how to mix it and such like.

We also use it to store the product, sometimes we even use packaging to add value, OK if you think about it display box in a supermarket that simply one carries the product and then opens up to display it, that adds value. But I guess most importantly we use packaging to protect and preserve the product, but not only do we use it to protect and preserve the product, but also to protect us and the environment from the product if it should be hazardous by nature.

So if all this is true, why do we have cows in India eating plastic? There's a very interesting video clip on YouTube, it's called the plastic cow, it's made by a society called the Kiruna Society for the care of animals and it goes about how the cows walk around India and eat whatever they can find, OK.

At about 25 minutes into the video, you'll see a surgeon doing an operation on a cow and removing 53 kilograms of plastic from the cow's stomach. The other question we have to ask is why do we have our operators standing ankle deep in cement, working with cement. It doesn't happen in all cement plants but certainly it does happen in plants.

And also why do we have floods in Bangkok? Our tag line or at least the tag line for BillerudKorsnas is that we challenge conventional packaging for a sustainable future and with this in our fiber, with this in our DNA we thought about these issues around the current conventional packaging and thought could we fix this?

And we came up with a concept that we believe is a better alternative. It is both business and planet friendly but we also realize that it is about business, we can't simply replace what there is and that it is about business and that we have to be realistic about it so we undertook a study to compare the new concept with current conventional plastic bags and it's those numbers that I will share with you now. The details of the study is certainly we did a market analysis first, we want to understand how many bags are used where etc, is there business opportunity for us and the customers?

We did an analysis in our laboratory and then we also did an analysis across the whole value chain which is currently actually still busy happening, our focus there was the key product is for global cement companies, mainly focused on the packaging's performance backed with a specific interest in what do the cement losses mean, how do we quantify that?

And also looking at
health and environmental issues. So the packaging that was compared was your normal current KPK sacks which I think is known to everybody I see lot's of heads nodding, the WPP the normal woven polypropylene sacks, we also looked at some Polyethylene laminated PE sacks and of course the Quickly Clean concept that we had. So let's have a quick look at the market there are some interesting numbers I think which you'll find interesting, global industrial sacks 88 billion are used annually, these are not retail bags it's not the bags you find in the supermarket, it's bags or sacks used to package industrial goods, powdered goods OK. 70% is building materials, so those of us here in the room in this industry, we use most of the bags or the sacks used globally.

Interesting is that 24 billion of that is paper, the balance 64 billion is all plastic and it's also interesting to see the regional differences, you can see in the developed world, this tends to be more paper used whereas in the developing world, there's a huge focus specific in the Asia Pacific region on plastic sacks OK. Well also the biggest consumer of plastic sacks is sitting in this region.

An interesting thought comes when one looks at that slide is that paper decomposes in roughly two months, anything from six to eight weeks. So, if in let's say 2014, we had the consumption of 88 billion sacks worldwide, by quarter three in 2015 the paper bags would have disappeared but we'd still be sitting on 64 billion plastic sacks in the industry.

When analyzing sacks, we have to understand how the sacks are used and what the demands on the sacks are. So we look at issues like strength, certainly the bag has to be strong enough to carry it from point A to point B, how does is work on the filling machine? Does it perform properly? Is it stable? Can one stuck it on a truck?

Can one stuck it on a palate, how does it affect the working environment, i think something we often talk about is safety and health but I've seen some implants where certainly that seems to be ignored, what about the branding, do you want to stand out from the rest of the other cement producers and last I'll get to the economy which is of course the interesting point. When we talk about the strength of packaging, the two ways we can do it, one is to measure the strength of the raw material which is what we've done here and you can see we've compared this 120 gram paper that we've developed, this high string high porous paper with a plastic in the laboratory OK. You can see that both the materials withstand a force of about 100 - 110 newtons OK, the major difference of course being when paper gets to this point it breaks OK, plastic doesn't it simply stretches and it carries on holding the product so a significant difference between the two materials.

This is another way of testing the strength of the packaging, it's called the drop test most of you know it, you simply lift up the bag and drop it to the ground. We tested in our laboratory that the plastic bags lasted up to 50 drops, we stopped testing them cause we believed they would carry on and we wouldn't be able to break them. With the new concept we got to 46 drops with the paperbag, a cement bag in Europe would last between 10 and 15 drops and that is because of the gentle handling that it has, certainly in this region South East Asia the handling is a lot rougher and hence the paper needs to be a lot stronger.

We're also coming to the first movie now and this shows you the drop test on our concept, it was a pilot trial we were doing in a cement plant and I want you to watch this guy on the right there as he slowly gets frustrated and starts throwing the sack down instead of dropping it OK. I'll stop it there, it carried on a little bit longer, the second one is in Vietnam where they have a very strange drop test instead of dropping it from 1.2 meters, they simply drop your bag through six meters from one floor to the next and this is our concept watch up there, this was done in a slow motion with my iPhone, beautifully the sack flies through the air and doesn't break as well.

That dust incidentally came from some plastic bags we were testing previously which did break OK. So the next step how does the sack perform on the filling machines OK? We have in our laboratory a standard Haver and Boecker filling machine, it's the same as the ones you have in your industry or in your plants and this step shows you how we do the filling, currently there's a paper bag being filled there, you will notice as the bag is being filled that no dust comes out and that that computer there shows you the filling curve, which then measures the fast feed and the slow feed.

And there you see the nice clean sacks dust free, OK. So how did these different sacks perform in terms of filling time in seconds, obviously the longer it takes the less productive your filling plant is. The green bar shows the first full, the gross full and then the fine feed is in the grey bar,OK. We can see the woven poly bag it fills the fastest which you can understand, it's just a woven plastic material, it's very porous alot of air can come out but of course then alot of cement can come out as well.

The second best was the quick full clean bag our new concept which was very similar to the woven poly but the difference there being it's a high porous paper, you don't get any dust coming out, OK. Clearly the KPK sack a very tight bag, that is why they actually put big perforations in the bag to try and get the aeration right but that bag was about 25% slower on the filling machine and we have also experienced and seen it in the industry that producers often complain about the slow filling speed of the bags.

This movie shows you the loading on a truck of a standard KPK sack, you'll see huge amounts of dust being emitted as the sacks are dropped. The dust comes from two areas, the one is the sewing on the top on the bottom OK, the seam and the other one is out of the perforations that they have to put in the bag to get the air out during the filling process to try and speed up the filling.

Our thinking here is what is the impact of that dust, how do we quantify the economic aspects as well as the environmental or the occupation health and safety aspects of this dust OK. So we consulted with alot of experts and we came to the conclusion that we need to purchase this Aerosol Mass Monitor, it's a little hand held instrument, it measures particle matter below 10 µm set, measures very small particle matters in the ranges of 1, 2.5, 4 and 10. P10 is inhalable particles, this is the particles that got into your lungs and from P4 down the particles are small enough to go into the alveoli of your lungs and infact get into your blood. Most regulators around the world use PM10, we are struggling to find regulations for the region here, we are still certainly searching but I can share two regulations the USA using an index saying anything from 3 -500 is extremely hazardous and also in Europe the number they seem to focus on is around about 40-50 micro gramms as the limit for this dust emissions.

We also know that plastic bags, what we call the concurrent conventional packaging, the KPK and woven poly bags emit alot of dust, you saw that in the video and medical research has shown that in mild cases you get nose and throat irritation, it gets worse when you have occupational asthma and eventually you get semi cosis scarring of the lungs and in the fourth case I don't think we need to talk about that.

So we then set about doing measurement of dust emissions during filling. This video clip shows us filling the paperbag, you can see in the corner there is the instrument, so a reasonably simple test, you put the instrument near the filling machine and you measure the amount of dust that comes out. So this is the quick full concept certainly there is no dust emissions but when we look at the graphs we start looking at the numbers we can see that the woven polypropylene and the KPK sack exceeded the capability of the measuring instrument. It may reach as a maximum of 10,000 those two bags emitted so much dust that the machine couldn't measure the amount anymore.

We did the same with drop testing, so we have an automated drop test in the laboratory which you will see later, so we did the same measurements with the drop tests and there with those three sacks that you can see also above 10,000. So it seems that the shock of dropping the bag and as you also saw in the video releases alot of dust out of these bags, the paper seem to come out pretty well in this measurements but still exceeding the European standard at any rate.

The last thing they measured there as well was then the stability of the bag on the carrier and you measure that in two ways, one is by measuring the friction coefficient which is the green bar and the other one is measuring the slip angle of the bag, simply at what angle does the bag start slipping that is the grey bar. Yes certainly the bigger number is better OK, so we can see that the quick for clean has the best friction, it has the highest ability on the packaging, it will be most payable on the track, it will be the most payable on the pallet. Important to understand it's not just a function of the material but it's also a function of the cement powder on the surface of the sack which impacts these measurements. OK, economics this is I guess the important bit that we really wanted to get down to, we did a calculation I have based it on a million tonne cement plant it therefore makes it easy to up and downscale and I've also assumed that we have 100% 50 kilogram sacks so no bulk filling, it's all put in bags. I then took a number of 606 kilograms CO2 per tonne for carbon emissions for the plant which I got from the 2010 sustainability report from Lafarge. I have seen numbers much higher than that 900-1000 seems to be a more common number but I think though that I would be a little bit more conservative with this. I got a cement selling price yesterday from somebody here in Thailand of 140 Baht per sack, 50 kilogram sack when purchased by the tonne and we have measured in the field a cement loss of about 100 grams per handling.

So every time the bag is dropped, KPK of a WPP bag is dropped, we on average measure a loss of 100 grams OK. And then we calculate the seven handlings which is pretty common we have seen some value chains the bag is handled up to 23 times. We'll be using an average of seven. The conclusion we come to is that the amount of dust lost amounts to 14000 tonnes of cement, OK.

So in a year, you're packaging a million tonnes of cement, you're handling the bags and what's emitting out of your bags is 14,000 tonnes, that's 1.4% of your production. That's a lost turnover of 1.17 million US dollars, OK and if one maybe thinks about it in a slightly different way your overheads are already covered anyway, so that is probably net revenue of 1.17 million dollars you can add to your bottom line. Then something we don't think about is what is the carbon footprint of this lost cement of this dust and that amounts to 8,500,000 tonnes of CO2.

So these are the type of thoughts I want you to live with and think about. So where are we today with our studies, certainly finished the laboratory studies, we've done some significant and interesting studies in the field, we have technically qualified in Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand, we're busy running a marketing trial in Myanmar and we will continue with our field studies and user insight.
BillerudKorsnas'squick feel clean cement sacks are a plastic free alternative that's cleaner for the environment and cleaner during manufacturing and transport. Unlike conventional plastic sacks the quick feel clean sack's unique design let's the air out and keeps the cement in.

The fact is, that with conventional plastic sacks up to 5% of the cement dust escapes during filling and distribution. This can lead to difficult working conditions, work related illness and loss of profit. Many cement manufacturers around the world have already made the switch and are seeing fast substantial returns on their investment, here's how.

Significantly increased productivity comes from the sacks ability to quickly swap air for cement. This allows the bags to be filled faster and more accurately. Cement dust remains in the sack during filling and handling with up to 99% dust production, factory staff and customers benefit from a cleaner, healthier work environment.

The base material is strong primary fibers. This combined with the latest paper sack technology ensures that quick for clean cement sacks can handle tough conditions and keep cement loss to an absolute minimum throughout distribution. And finally, quick for clean sacks are guaranteed to come from sustainable sources and are 100% compostable. They're the perfect solution for increasing competitiveness in the global market and the ideal alternative to conventional plastic sacks.

Good for you, your profits and the planet. I will not spend time on the benefits, my final thoughtsthis is not exactly a plug and play as you guys know, some of you have value chains, you have extreme handling of the sacks, we need to go slowly with that, we cannot simply swap the plastic and the paper packaging without a problem, we have to certainly look at how the sacks are handled and I saw outside there somebody's tag line is plug and grind, so I guess swap at shopping at maybe a little bit of plugging it in and then working our way through the value chain but certainly the benefits are enormous and it is worth looking at.

Secondly, I'd like you to visit our stand, I'd like you to come and try and tear one of our bags we have plenty there. Should you manage to tear the bag, we'll put your business card in a bowl and we'll then draw out of that bowl and the winner we will send one of the best and latest ipads we can find.

We'll have to join the queue there that Carson was talking about to try and get the iPad for you. So please visit us stand number 12 and then the last one, as I said 64 billion plastic bags a year, if your child is born today by the time they're 20 that will be 1.28 trillion plastic sacks running around the world. So please consider us alternative and I look forward to seeing you at our stand. Thank you very much.

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