Consumables

WOODEN HOTEL KEY CARDS REDUCE PLASTIC WASTE DURING THE CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE

Friday 11. December 2009 - Veneer is traditionally associated with plywood and furniture industry even though the material can be used in many creative ways. During the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, 30 hotels replace plastic key cards with renewable wooden key cards.

The environmentally friendly key cards are a patent pending product manufactured and supplied by the company Sustainable Cards using UPM’s veneer.

The wooden key cards are made of light-coloured WISA veneer, a special coated birch veneer that is elastic and stiff. It is suitable for printing with conventional printing techniques. The card can be fully recovered to produce bioenergy and it is a compostable material.

“Finnish veneer made of birch is a smart material and feels nice to touch. We are pleased that our sustainable product has supported the creation of an innovation like this,” says Panu Anttila, Director for UPM’s Veneer Business.

Sustainable Cards has delivered approximately 100,000 key cards made of veneer to the Copenhagen hotels. A typical 200-room hotel uses annually 12,000 key cards. Significant amounts of plastic waste can be reduced by replacing plastic key cards with wooden ones, and ensuring they are recycled, recovered or re-used.

In addition to WISA veneer, UPM via it’s customer Lyreco, is supplying roughly nine million sheets of copy paper to the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Future from UPM’s Docelles mill in France was selected due to its superior environmental features, including sustainable sourcing of wood raw material and the EU Eco-label, the official EU mark awarded to greener products.