In the Body Shop store on Oxford Street, London, the exclusive packaging materials are made of Swedish paper from BillerudKorsnäs.
Every year BillerudKorsnäs ships more than 250,000 tonnes of paper via the Port of Gothenburg. Much of this goes to England, where the cardboard is transformed into exclusive gift packaging and filled with products from worldwide cosmetic chain The Body Shop.
The forests around Örebro are home to the trees that eventually become attractive gift packaging in London. After the trees are felled and cut to suitable lengths, the wood is transported by truck to the BillerudKorsnäs sawmill in Frövi. There the timber is ground into chips which are processed to create paper pulp. This pulp is pressed and formed into cardboard.
A single paper machine can produce more than 1000 metres of cardboard per minute. After the paper dries it is cut into sheets that are wrapped in protective packaging and loaded onto pallets. The pallets are loaded onto trains at the paper mill, from where they are transported to the Port of Gothenburg.
The train goes straight from the mill in Frövi to the Port of Gothenburg. The journey takes 5 hours.
The forestry industry is the sector that utilises Sweden’s railways the most, accounting for one quarter of all rail transportation.
Every day, 70 trains arrive at and depart from the Port of Gothenburg. These trains replace 1400 trucks on the roads.
When the train from Frövi pulls into the Port of Gothenburg, it goes straight into the roro terminal, Gothenburg Roro, and then on to the transhipment depot for paper, Paper Logistics Centre. Here the paper is lifted off the train using fork-lift trucks, and loaded into cassettes. Now the paper is ready to be loaded on board the ship for England.
The cassettes of cardboard from Frövi are towed onto the cargo ship. The ship sets sail across the North Sea to the port of Immingham on the east coast of Britain. From the terminal there about 16 ships a week depart for various destinations in England and Belgium.
The England route is operated by Danish-owned shipping line DFDS.
The trip from Gothenburg to Immingham takes 26 hours.
Every ship on the England route is equipped with a scrubber, minimising emissions of sulphur and particulates.
England is Sweden’s fifth largest export market. Huge quantities of wood, paper and pulp are exported to England every year. The ship with its cargo from BillerudKorsnäs ties up in DFDS’s own terminal, Nordic Terminal, in the Port of Immingham. Here the cassettes are towed off the ship and the paper is reloaded onto trucks for further transport to Wimbledon.
It takes just over 3.5 hours to transport the cardboard by truck from the port to Wimbledon.
At Curtis PLC in Wimbledon the cardboard is transformed into exclusive packaging materials for beauty-product retailer The Body Shop. First the graphic design is printed onto the cardboard, which is then stamped and folded. The process is optimised to ensure minimum possible waste of material.
When the packaging is ready it is driven by truck to The Body Shop factory in Worthing, in southern England.
At the factory the packaging is filled with a variety of beauty products. These are then distributed to shops the world over, including by truck to the store on London’s Oxford Street.
Oxford Street in London has one of The Body Shop’s largest stores. The finished packages arrive here directly from the factory in Worthing. Oxford Street is said to be Europe’s biggest shopping parade, with more than 300 stores and hosting 200 million visitors a year. In other words, a gigantic market for Swedish forestry products that have been transformed into exclusive consumer packaging.
Sea freight is a climate-smart way of transporting goods. The entire trip released just 4 grams of CO2per packaging unit. What is more, the train from Frövi to the Port of Gothenburg is the most CO2-lean means of land-based transport.
If instead the cardboard had been driven the whole way by truck, it would only have made it to the Netherlands for the same CO2 emissions per package.
Eating a hamburger results in more than four hundred times higher emissions than transporting a gift wrapper from Sweden to London.
