TOKYO (From news reports) -- Japan's biggest paper manufacturers have set up crack marketing and research units to leverage global movements against disposable plastic and convince the world that a "paperised" future is more than pulp fiction.
The specially established divisions will be used to fast-track innovations that represent a paper solution to any given packaging quandary. They will also centralise the sales pitch for paper as both governments and corporations lay out their ambitions to curb plastic bags, plastic straws and other "one use" items.
The paper proselytising by Japan's biggest manufacturers follows a recent pledge by Starbucks that it would stop using plastic straws globally by 2020, and more limited programmes by the likes of Disney and McDonald's.
The absence of similarly eye-catching pledges by Japanese restaurants and retailers, said one paper-company executive, could be a source of embarrassment as Tokyo enters the two-year countdown to the 2020 Olympics. Analysts of the sector suspect that the Japanese government may soon step in with subsidies for R&D within the paper sector that would widen the product's potential uses.
Oji Holdings, which ranks among the world's top five paper groups by sales, has commandeered around 30 executives for its newly formed "Innovation Promotion HQ". Its heavyweight domestic rival, Nippon Paper Industries, last month established an elite "Paperising Promotion Office". The department, after years of countless visions of the "paperless office", proudly comes with its own revivalist slogan: "Let paper do what it can do".
As well as pushing coffee and fast-food chains to accelerate the adoption of paper straws and paper lids, the units will work on convincing the consumer products industry to switch to milk carton-style containers for shampoo, shower gel and other liquids.
Prominent in Nippon Paper's pitch is a technology that significantly improves the ability of a paper bag to contain the smell of the product it contains -- a treatment that could, in theory, make paper more viable for potato chips, breakfast cereal and other foods. Analysts covering the company declare cautious optimism for the "growing business opportunities".
There are, admit Nippon Paper's executives, substantial hurdles for the paperisation movement, the highest being cost. Even the cheapest paper straw costs around six times as much as the plastic one it would replace -- a difference arising from the relative prices of the basic materials involved. Many paper-based containers are also trickier to make than their plastic counterparts: unlike plastic, paper edges cannot be fused together with heat and must be glued.
Takaomi Kono, an analyst covering the paper and pulp sector for Nomura said that while the expense and complexity of paper had, to date, been the main obstacles to market growth "we expect producers to improve their technological expertise and think that governments will provide subsidies too".
