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Earthrings are 100% recyclable and compostable packaging rings designed to withstand moisture and make your beer look as good as it tastes. Source: Timberbiz The company says it has reinvented cardboard, making it rugged enough to stand up to soggy coolers and rainy fishing trips. Plus, Earthrings are totally biodegradable, so you can add them straight to the garden compost. Earthrings are designed to reduce packaging waste and are crafted from multiple layers of solid fibre cardboard with a biodegradable, moisture-resistant coating. These are 100% recyclable, compostable, and made with environmentally friendly inks, providing an eco-friendly alternative to traditional plastic packaging. Earthrings provide several key benefits: Reduced Environmental Impact: they decompose naturally, helping to reduce landfill waste and ocean pollution. Versatility in Disposal: They can be easily recycled or composted, offering flexibility for consumers and minimizing negative environmental impact. Durability and Strength: Despite being eco-friendly, Earthrings are designed to securely hold and protect beverage cans. Reduced Packaging Waste: It is estimated this transition will divert 23,529 kg of packaging waste annually from the landfill.  

Södra is investing in a production line at Värö which will create a vegetable tanning agent from bark. This new tannin can be used to process leather in a more environmentally friendly way. Source: Timberbiz Scheduled to be commissioned in 2026, the plant will have the capacity to produce tannins for millions of square metres of leather. Södra’s Board of Directors has approved the project which will be an integral part of the Värö mill and is expected to be able to produce tanning material equivalent to millions of square metres of leather. “This investment decision fits well with our overall ambition to increase the added value from every tree and thus contribute to the profitability of our members’ forest estates,” explains Lotta Lyrå, CEO of Södra. Developing more environmentally friendly alternatives by making additional products from the forest is an excellent example of how we use our experience, knowledge and innovation expertise to make the most of the forest’s resources, she said. Since 2006, Södra Innovation, a business area within the member-owned forest group has been exploring how tannins found in the bark of trees can be efficiently processed and used as tanning agents. Using bark for tanning is not new, but Södra is now industrialising the process in which the tanning substance is leached from the bark and turned into a product for tanning leather. “With this new patented process, we can now make a product from an, until now, unused re-source. A product that can be used in a completely different industry and support the leather industry in its transition to more sustainable tanning methods,” says Catrin Gustavsson, Business Area Manager at Södra Innovation.

With the help of a drone equipped with its own portable mobile base station, a forestry machine has been remotely controlled via 5G in an area with limited connectivity. Source: The Fast Mode The test was carried out in a forest outside Västerås, central Sweden, as part of a research project involving Mittuniversitetet, Telia, Ericsson, Skogforsk, SCA, Volvo CE and Biometria, co-funded by Vinnova and the program for Advanced Digitalization. The project group passed a milestone in November 2021 when it was able to remotely control a timber loader at SCA’s Torsboda timber terminal outside Timrå in northern Sweden. After this success, the group set itself the challenge of using a drone equipped with its own portable mobile base station to extend 5G network coverage to an area where there would otherwise be none and to use that temporary connectivity to enable a forestry machine to be remotely controlled. At the beginning of May, successful tests were carried out in a forest in Virsbo outside Västerås, as Magnus Leonhardt, Head of Strategy and Innovation for Telia Sweden’s B2B business, explains. “We can now establish that it is possible to connect and remotely control large vehicles via a drone, which in practice acts as a base station in the mobile network,” Mr Leonhardt said. “This creates completely new and flexible opportunities to connect businesses that work in areas with insufficient network coverage. Apart from the forestry and agricultural industry, the technology can be used in disaster areas if normal mobile coverage is completely knocked out.” After a basic technical briefing, the forestry machine was transported to a clear-cutting site where it was connected using 5G technology mounted on a drone. During the test, the drone was approximately 500 meters from the forestry machine but created a coverage area extending up to 3 kilometres. The driver of the forestry machine was in Skogforsk’s remote control lab in Uppsala, roughly 80 kilometres away, says Petrus Jönsson, a researcher and deputy program manager at Skogforsk, who participated in the test. With the help of a drone equipped with its own portable mobile base station, a forestry machine has been remotely controlled via 5G in an area with limited connectivity. “In this test, we chose to remotely control a forwarder in a clearing to assess the connection via the drone,” Jönsson says. “In the next step, we want to test connecting and remotely controlling a soil preparation machine, which is a much heavier machine that operates in inaccessible terrain. The goal for us is to improve the working environment for the drivers, and soil preparation workers, in particular, operate in a very tough environment.” The project aims to investigate how drone technology and 5G technology could enable remote areas around Sweden to be worked with remote-controlled vehicles. Among other things, Mittuniversitetet’s researchers are studying the latency and reliability in data communication, which is very important when remotely controlling machinery, as Professor Mattias O’Nils explains. “We have collected data from the test with the drone and will now analyse and evaluate the results,” O’Nils says. “We will also do comparative studies with other types of connections such as Wi-Fi-based networks and explore further possibilities with 5G.”