LCP tour

Who: Lawrence Paper Company right here in Lawrence Kansas. Family Owned 130 year old company, leading manufacturer of corrugated cardboard boxes, packaging, and corrugated products in the US. They were actually right next door to a past tour, Reuter Organ Company

Products: “quality packaging to meet your needs” “we promise ready for retail packaging and transport” sales and marketing displays, brown box packaging, in-store displays, retail showcasing, POP displays, clamshells, bagging, shrink-wrap, contract packing, Assembly packing planning, shipping containers

Markets: Industrial shipping markets, Mostly the Retail Market.

Companies: “our neighbors are also our customers” Tyson, Hallmark, Milkbone, Dynamic Disk, Primos Hunting, Vera Wang, Calvin Kline, ect. They try to market to anyone has a great product, because LPC has the perfect way to package it.  They boast over 15,000 accounts. Many of the accounts seemed to be regional to the Midwest or at least a center for distribution in the Midwest.

Materials:

Pulped Pine Trees

Paper – (they measured by “paper pound weight”)(bleached or unbleached Kraft) Cellulose, Hemi-cellulose and Lignin, raw material from paper mills in Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, SE, etc.

Adhesive – cornstarch = easy, cheap and environmentally friendly

Dyes – (especially used in Bleached Kraft Paper) made in house

Paraffin – added to make water- or grease-resistant container for food products

Clay – added for better print quality on surface

Recycling:

claimed that they don’t throw away a single ounce of pulp or paper that could have been recycled

Recycle 15 tons of paper per day (is that a good thing?)

They use natural paper product that easily break down

Glues are natural because they are corn starch based

Forming Technologies:

Rolling paper onto machines

Feeding paper and corrugate through

Heat conditioning paper and corrugate

Gluing

Seal with heat

Cutting Technologies:

Rotary die cutter

Fixed Die Stamp

Bladed roller

Fixed Knife CNC (primarily prototypes, small jobs)

Joining Technologies:

Fluted Corrugator

single-facer glue roller

Flexo folder and gluer

Heated Rollers

Finishing Technologies:

Tinting

Flexo folder/ gluer

Color matching

Impressions: It was great to see some KU grads working there in the design department. I was a little disappointed to hear that most of the package design and graphics work came down from the client or the clients outside design firm. This seemingly left only the menial design choices for LPC staff. Still their responsibility seemed to be to know what they could produce and match the graphics to a package shape design.