Few visitors fail to be wowed by the items on display in the main showroom at Cheng Loong Corp.’s headquarters in New Taipei City. The centerpiece of the exhibit is a nearly half-size replica of an old-style locomotive and three railway cars, but the space also showcases a wide variety of items including furniture, clocks and a large Chinese-style vase. What is unusual is that all of the items are made of cardboard created from recycled paper. “There are a lot of potential applications for paper. Using it in unconventional ways could perhaps help create another significant market for our company in the future,” says James Huang (黃宗超), one of the designers at Cheng Loong.
The largest manufacturer of paper for industrial use in Taiwan, Cheng Loong has specialized in paper and corrugated cardboard containers since its founding in 1959. But the company’s development over the past three decades reflects how value can be added to paper goods through design. Cheng Loong became serious about the design of its packaging products in 1983 when it started to take part and win awards in design competitions. Five years later the enterprise entered the World Packaging Organization’s (WPO) annual design contest and won Taiwan’s first WorldStar Award. Since then, the company has netted 26 WorldStar Awards for its packaging designs. The WPO is an international federation of packaging associations and other related groups and was founded in Tokyo in 1968.
About 20 years ago, Cheng Loong took notice of its customers’ growing interest in building their corporate image and began to work with them in this respect, says Maggie Chen (陳靜宜), personal secretary to the company’s president. Currently, Cheng Loong services more than 4,000 customers, including international brands like Nike and Apple.
Epackage’s versions of games often found in Taiwan’s night markets (Photo Courtesy of epackage Creative Packaging Solutions)
In the mid-2000s, the company began to develop paper-based products for everyday life in addition to its core business of making paper packaging. “Designers started to use their spare time to develop such designs. I feel so happy whenever my work finds a new customer,” says Huang, who created the Chinese-style vase. The designer works in the structural design section of Cheng Loong’s Packaging Design and Innovation Center, which is responsible for designing general containers as well as cultural creative products.
For about five months in 2010, Cheng Loong sent seven designers to the Saturday workshops that the National Palace Museum (NPM) holds to promote its world-class collection of Chinese artworks to the cultural and creative industry. At the end of that year, the NPM held a four-day exhibition featuring works by Cheng Loong and other participating designers who were inspired by the museum’s treasures.
The Taipei World Design Expo held in November 2011 prompted Cheng Loong to create a new batch of paper-based cultural items. The event also featured similar work from several smaller companies such as epackage Creative Packaging Solutions, another WPO WorldStar Award winner from Taiwan. Along with ingeniously designed paper containers, a product line that constitutes its core business, epackage debuted some 20 culturally based products. “An outstanding cultural creative product can fetch a price five times its cost, compared with an average item with a price that might be just 25 percent higher than its cost,” says epackage founder Johnbo Tsao (曹仲標), explaining why creativity is a core value of his business.
Cheng Loong’s designers pose with their creations in a company showroom. Founded in 1959, Taiwan’s largest producer of paper for industrial use began designing cultural creative products in the mid-2000s. (Photo by Chang Su-ching)
Actually, many of epackage’s paper containers have already been deemed collectible items. Two of its packages for pineapple cakes, for example, combine striking graphic and structural designs and won the top two places in a 2008 contest organized by the Taipei City Government. Recently, Tsao has expanded his designs to include non-packaging items like cardboard versions of the ring toss and pinball games often seen in Taiwan’s night markets.
Likewise, Paper Space Co. was another company that promoted its paper-based works at the 2011 expo. The company was founded in 2006 at the Incubation and Innovation Center under New Taipei City’s National Taiwan University of Arts and has become known for exhibition partitions and display shelves made of cardboard.
Some paper furniture makers create items by stacking cardboard sheets together, says Paper Space founder C.P. Chu (朱際平), but the results are just heavy items that use a great deal of cardboard. The key to making durable cardboard display shelves and furniture is to design the structure of each piece well, he says.
Carefully designed cardboard furniture can also be quite convenient to move around, says Wendy Chang (張雯雯), Paper Space’s sales manager. This is not only related to the lightness of the material, but the ease with which the furniture can be assembled and taken apart. “All the products can be dismantled and neatly packed into one container,” Chang says. She explains that an item made of plywood, a common material used to make partitions and shelves, can be six times heavier than one made of cardboard, which explains why her company is receiving particular attention from businesspeople who travel to exhibit products at international trade shows. “It’s troublesome to ship wooden products abroad also because they must be fumigated before they’re imported to certain countries to kill any live insects or their eggs inside,” Chang says of one more aspect in which cardboard products are superior.
Waste paper set to be recycled by Cheng Loong. Products that use recovered paper echo the world trend for sustainable development. (Photo Courtesy of Cheng Loong Corp.)
Last year, Paper Space created a sub-brand, Cute-Cube, which focuses on cultural creative products, notably a series of artistic tables and chairs that are made completely of cardboard. The furniture pieces, which also make striking décor items, were inspired by scenic spots in the Grand Canyon in the United States, and were another draw for visitors to the 2011 design expo in Taipei. The company’s stationery items also attracted attention for their original designs. “Visitors to our showroom always want to sit on our cardboard chairs to see whether they’re sturdy enough. Actually, they can hold at least 100 kilograms,” C.P. Chu says.
Another question consumers often ask when they see Paper Space products is how they are made waterproof. Chang Wen-tsung (張文聰), deputy manager of the Packaging Design and Innovation Center at Cheng Loong, Paper Space’s main supplier, says some manufacturers coat their cardboard with wax, but the process of recycling such material often leaves stains on the new cardboard. Cheng Loong applies a thin plastic film to its cardboard.
Paper-based items have other advantages compared with similar products that are traditionally made of non-paper materials. “It’s easier to print on paper than on other materials,” says Johnbo Tsao, who previously worked in the printing sector. The cost of equipment for mass producing paper goods is also much cheaper than that for other materials, Tsao says.
The use of recycled paper is also in line with the trend toward environmental protection. Some 90 percent of Cheng Loong’s products are made from wastepaper. The company uses about 1.4 million metric tons of wastepaper annually, of which about 1 million metric tons is generated in Taiwan and the remainder imported. Taiwan recovers around 3 million metric tons of paper each year. “We sometimes joke that without Cheng Loong, the government might have had to build several additional incinerators,” Chang Wen-tsung says.
Paper-based products by Cheng Loong exhibited at the 2011 Taipei World Design Expo. The expo greatly enhanced the sector’s visibility. (Photo Courtesy of Cheng Loong Corp.)
Taiwan’s relatively high paper recycling rate of between 65 and 70 percent, compared with 60 percent in the United States, for example, helps provide rich resources for Cheng Loong, Maggie Chen says. The amount of paper products in Taiwan that are made of recycled paper is even higher—about 85 percent by weight—although just 5 percent of all tissue paper consumed locally is made from paper waste, a much lower figure than many developed countries. “Taiwan has a good system for recycling wastepaper. We have to because natural resources are especially valuable in such a small place,” Chen says.
It is also more economical to use recycled paper. According to Chen, a metric ton of wastepaper costs about NT$5,000 (US$166), whereas the price for the same weight of imported wood pulp can reach US$750. The price gap can affect the final cost of an item considerably. An example is a trash can designed by the company. “Raw materials account for more than 60 percent of its total cost,” Chen says.
Not Just about Money
C.P. Chu says that although other factors, including cost, affect purchasing decisions, recycled paper is becoming more accepted by an increasingly eco-conscious public. Vincent Wang (王文詵), who works for a company selling organic food and green building materials, agrees. “It’s cheaper to use products made of recycled paper to build booths at trade shows, but we also want to make a statement by opting for them to echo our company’s corporate image,” Wang says. Wang’s company began to use Paper Space’s display products at an exhibition in October 2011. More than 90 percent of the cardboard Paper Space uses has been recycled, a green feature that won the company a National Design Award in 2006.
Johnbo Tsao notes the limitations of recycled paper, however, explaining that wastepaper cannot be used to make containers that come into direct contact with food, for example. He is also quick to remind those concerned about harvesting trees for wood pulp that there are forests cultivated especially for production, where trees are farmed in a sustainable manner. Overall, Tsao notes that paper is an environmentally friendly choice partly because it is easier to recycle than other materials.
Cardboard display shelves, Paper Space’s main product line. People’s bias against or lack of awareness of paper-based products are the main barriers to their development, company founder C.P. Chu says. (Photo Courtesy of Paper Space Co.)
Light, inexpensive and easily recycled, paper is poised to be more widely applied in the future. As far as Chu knows, however, there is no commercial production of paper-based furniture yet, with individual pieces being sold to those who happen to see them at an exhibition or through word of mouth. And even though he has been seeing phenomenal growth in sales of around 20 percent annually for the cardboard partitions and shelves that make up his core business, such products still constitute only a tiny fraction of the overall market for exhibition furniture. At a trade show in November 2011 that housed more than 300 booths, Wang notes that his company’s were the only ones made of cardboard, but he adds that quite a few participating enterprises inquired about them. Chu says the major obstacle to the development of paper-based products “is either people’s bias or lack of awareness about them. They just don’t think a paper chair can be so strong.”
Getting Noticed
Events such as the month-long Taipei design expo, which recorded 1.36 million visitors, are of great significance in promoting the emerging industry. Indeed, after the high-profile show, Ikea, the international home products company, and a shopping mall in New Taipei City expressed interest in selling several pieces of Cheng Loong’s cultural creative line. Similarly, both Tsao of epackage and Wendy Chang of Paper Space say a number of cultural creative items that debuted at the show impressed visiting retail outlet operators and have a strong chance of entering commercial production at some point in the future.
A visit to Cheng Loong’s showroom has also been an eye-opening experience for officials from the Taiwan Railway Administration. According to Chang Wen-tsung, Cheng Loong’s paper locomotive replicas greatly interested the officials. Perhaps visitors to Taiwan’s major train stations will soon be able to reminisce about the old days of rail travel thanks to efforts from an unlikely source: Taiwan’s creative paper manufacturers.
Write to Oscar Chung at oscar@mail.gio.gov.tw