Corrugated cardboard boxes are the shipping containers of choice for most products in many supply chains in the world today. Efficient transport, material handling, storage, and inventory control depend on their strength, dimensions, and printed symbols.
Corrugated cardboard has been used for transport packaging for over 100 years. One of the greatest advantages of corrugated cardboard is that packages can be tailor-made to suit the product, and that it is made from a renewable raw material.
Corrugated cardboard is the result of joining various sheets of paper (with specific qualities) that are kept the same distance apart because one or more pieces of corrugated paper are placed between them. This configuration gives corrugated cardboard properties of rigidity, resistance and protection.
Corrugated board absorbs shock and affords the package stability so that boxes can be stacked one on top of the other, while the flat sheets of paper give the package tenacity, resistance to moisture and strength. This parameter is one of the most important ones in logistics terms as it indicates the weight the box can withstand when in a static pile and when moving (bearing in mind the accelerations it can suffer during handling and transport as it passes along the supply chain).
The key production process in corrugated cardboard manufacture is the “corrugator” machine. The manufacture of corrugated packaging can be roughly classified into two processes:
*the containerboard combining process, which glues one or more sheets of fluted corrugating medium to one or more flat facings of linerboard;
*and the box manufacturing process, which is used to assemble the corrugated sheets into boxes.
Corrugated cardboard box
