A carton is a box or container usually made of

liquid packaging board Liquid packaging board is a multi-ply paperboard with high stiffness, strong wet sizing and a high barrier coating, e.g. plastic. Only virgin paper fibers are used. The barrier coating must hold the liquid and prevent migration of air and flavo ...

paperboard Paperboard is a thick paper-based material. While there is no rigid differentiation between paper and paperboard, paperboard is generally thicker (usually over 0.30 mm, 0.012 in, or 12 points) than paper and has certain superior attributes ...

and sometimes of

corrugated fiberboard Corrugated fiberboard or corrugated cardboard is a type of packaging material consisting of a fluted corrugated sheet and one or two flat linerboards. It is made on "flute lamination machines" or "corrugators" and is used for making corrugate ...

. Many types of cartons are used in

packaging Packaging is the science, art and technology of enclosing or protecting products for distribution, storage, sale, and use. Packaging also refers to the process of designing, evaluating, and producing packages. Packaging can be described as a c ...

. Sometimes a carton is also called a box.

Types of cartons

Folding cartons

A carton is a type of

typically made from paperboard that is suitable for food, pharmaceuticals, hardware, and many other types of products.

Folding carton The folding carton created the packaging industry as it is known today, beginning in the late 19th century. The process involves folding carton made of paperboard that is printed, laminated, cut, then folded and glued. The cartons are shipped fla ...

s are usually combined into a tube at the manufacturer and shipped flat (knocked down) to the packager. Tray styles have a solid bottom and are often shipped as flat blanks and assembled by the packager. Some also are self-erecting. High-speed equipment is available to set up, load, and close the cartons.

Egg carton

Egg cartons or trays are designed to protect whole eggs while in transit. Traditionally, these have been made of

molded pulp Molded pulp or molded fiber (also spelled as moulded pulp or moulded fibre) is a packaging material, that is typically made from recycled paperboard and/or newsprint. It is used for protective packaging or for food service trays and beverage c ...

. This uses recycled newsprint which is molded into a shape which protects the eggs. More recently, egg cartons have also been made from

expanded polystyrene Polystyrene (PS) is a synthetic polymer made from monomers of the aromatic hydrocarbon styrene. Polystyrene can be solid or foamed. General-purpose polystyrene is clear, hard, and brittle. It is an inexpensive resin per unit weight. It is ...

and

PET A pet, or companion animal, is an animal kept primarily for a person's company or entertainment rather than as a working animal, livestock, or a laboratory animal. Popular pets are often considered to have attractive appearances, intelligence ...

Aseptic carton

Cartons for liquids can be fabricated from laminates of

, foil, and polyethylene. Most are based on either

Tetra Pak Tetra Pak is a Swedish–Swiss multinational food packaging and processing company with head offices in Lund, Sweden, and Pully, Switzerland. The company offers packaging, filling machines and processing for dairy, beverages, cheese, ice cre ...

or SIG Combibloc systems. One option is to have the printed laminate supplied on a roll. The carton is cut, scored, and formed at the packager. A second option is to have the pre-assembled tubes delivered to the packaging plant for completion and filling. These are suited for

aseptic processing Aseptic processing is a processing technique wherein commercially thermally sterilized liquid products (typically food or pharmaceutical) are packaged into previously sterilized containers under sterile conditions to produce shelf-stable products ...

and are used for milk, soup, juice, etc. Paperboard-based cartons are lighter compared to a similarly-sized steel can, but is harder to recycle. Some open-loop recycling operations pelletize or flatten ground-up cartons for use in building materials; closed-loop recycling is possible by separating the layers before processing, though some recyclers only recycle the cardboard fibers.

Gable top

Gable top cartons are often used for liquid products such as milk, juice, etc. These use

polyethylene Polyethylene or polythene (abbreviated PE; IUPAC name polyethene or poly(methylene)) is the most commonly produced plastic. It is a polymer, primarily used for packaging ( plastic bags, plastic films, geomembranes and containers including b ...

-coated paperboard or other

and sometimes a foil laminate. Most are opened by pushing open the gables at the top back and pulling the top (spout) out. Some have fitments to assist in opening and eating the contents.

Waxed paperboard beverage carton (historical)

Cuboid waxed paperboard beverage, a formed waxed paperboard plug crimped and sealed, preceded gabled polyethylene-coated paperboard cartons. Waxed paper straws were used to drink. Borden distributed milk in this way.

Packaging history

Robert Gair was a Brooklyn printer and paper-bag maker during the 1870s. While he was printing an order of seed bags, a metal rule normally used to crease bags shifted in position and cut the bag. Gair concluded that cutting and creasing paperboard in one operation would have advantages; the first automatically made carton, now referred to as "semi-flexible packaging", was created.

;Folded carton In 1817, the first commercial cardboard box production began, in England. In 1879,

Robert Gair Robert Gair was a Scottish printer and paper bag maker who invented the folding carton in 1879. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1839 he came to the United States at age 14. Gair invented the paperboard folding carton by accident when a metal rul ...

, in Brooklyn, New York, operated a factory that die-ruled, cut, and scored

into a single impression of a folded carton. By 1896, the

National Biscuit Company Nabisco (, abbreviated from the earlier name National Biscuit Company) is an American manufacturer of cookies and snacks headquartered in East Hanover, New Jersey. The company is a subsidiary of Illinois-based Mondelēz International. Nabisco' ...

was the first to use cartons to package crackers.

During the first decade of the 1900s, G. W. Maxwell developed the first paper milk carton.

;Milk carton In 1908, Dr. Winslow, of Seattle, Washington, described paper

milk Milk is a white liquid food produced by the mammary glands of mammals. It is the primary source of nutrition for young mammals (including breastfed human infants) before they are able to digest solid food. Immune factors and immune-modulat ...

containers that were commercially sold in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...

and

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world ...

as early as 1906. The inventor of this carton was G.W. Maxwell. Later, in 1915 John Van Wormer of Toledo, Ohio, received the a

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...

for the gable-topped, wax-coated, "paper bottle," a folded blank box for holding milk, calling it the "Pure-Pak." The milk carton could be folded, glued, filled with milk, and sealed at a dairy farm. In 1953, Seok-kyun Shin introduced the gable-topped milk carton to Korea.Hence, the Edison of Korea, Doctor Shin Seok-kyun, suggested creating packages that would store milk for a prolonged time
. In the 1960s, Mario Lepore, a Detroit engineer designed a machine to fold and seal a gable top paper carton. In 1957, a paper milk carton company, Kieckhefer Container Co. merged with the

Weyerhauser Weyerhaeuser () is an American timberland company which owns nearly of timberlands in the U.S., and manages an additional of timberlands under long-term licenses in Canada. The company also manufactures wood products. It operates as a real ...

Timber Company of

Tacoma, Washington Tacoma ( ) is the county seat of Pierce County, Washington, United States. A port city, it is situated along Washington's Puget Sound, southwest of Seattle, northeast of the state capital, Olympia, and northwest of Mount Rainier National Pa ...

Shape

Although quite often shaped like a

cuboid In geometry, a cuboid is a hexahedron, a six-faced solid. Its faces are quadrilaterals. Cuboid means "like a cube", in the sense that by adjusting the length of the edges or the angles between edges and faces a cuboid can be transformed into a c ...

, it is not uncommon to find cartons lacking

right angle In geometry and trigonometry, a right angle is an angle of exactly 90 degrees or radians corresponding to a quarter turn. If a ray is placed so that its endpoint is on a line and the adjacent angles are equal, then they are right angles. Th ...

s and straight edges, as in

squround A squround is a container whose shape is between a square and a round tub. It resembles an oval but is sometimes closer to a rectangle with rounded corners. These allow the contents to be easily scooped out of the container. The name is a port ...

s used for

ice cream Ice cream is a sweetened frozen food typically eaten as a snack or dessert. It may be made from milk or cream and is flavoured with a sweetener, either sugar or an alternative, and a spice, such as cocoa or vanilla, or with fruit such as ...

Tetrahedron In geometry, a tetrahedron (plural: tetrahedra or tetrahedrons), also known as a triangular pyramid, is a polyhedron composed of four triangular faces, six straight edges, and four vertex corners. The tetrahedron is the simplest of all ...

s and other shapes are available. Cartons with a hexagonal or octagonal cross sections are sometimes used for specialty items.

Materials

Cartons can be made from many materials:

, duplex, white kraft, recycled and many more various plastics, or a

composite Composite or compositing may refer to: Materials * Composite material, a material that is made from several different substances ** Metal matrix composite, composed of metal and other parts ** Cermet, a composite of ceramic and metallic materials ...

. Some are "food grade" for direct contact with foods. Many cartons are made out of a single piece of paperboard. Depending on the need, this paperboard can be waxed or coated with

to form a moisture barrier. This may serve to contain a liquid product or keep a powder dry.

Artistic design

In art history, the

carton A carton is a box or container usually made of liquid packaging board, paperboard and sometimes of corrugated fiberboard. Many types of cartons are used in packaging. Sometimes a carton is also called a box. Types of cartons Folding carto ...

(pronounced the French way) was a drawing on heavy pasteboard or paperboard, used as life-size design for the manufacture in an

atelier An atelier () is the private workshop or studio of a professional artist in the fine or decorative arts or an architect, where a principal master and a number of assistants, students, and apprentices can work together producing fine art or ...

of a valuable

tapestry Tapestry is a form of textile art, traditionally woven by hand on a loom. Tapestry is weft-faced weaving, in which all the warp threads are hidden in the completed work, unlike most woven textiles, where both the warp and the weft threads ma ...

, such as a

gobelin Gobelin was the name of a family of dyers, who in all probability came originally from Reims, France, and who in the middle of the 15th century established themselves in the Faubourg Saint Marcel, Paris, on the banks of the Bièvre. The first ...

. During the weaving it hung behind the tapestry in the making, a time-consuming process thus in a creative sense simplified to 'mechanical' painting-by-numbers. As these were extremely valuable, often commanded by the very richest art-buyers, including princes who hung them in their palaces and even took them on their travels as prestigious displays of wealth, often with a visual message, especially the world-famous Flemish ateliers were deemed worthy to have cartons made by some of the greatest graphic artists of the time, including such celebrated painters as Rubens. In the 1980s, milk cartons in the United States often printed photos of missing children with the hope that someone would recognize the photograph and provide information to police.

Carton-pierre

''Carton-pierre'' was a material used for the making of raised ornaments for wall and ceiling decoration. It is composed of the pulp of paper mixed with whiting (ground calcium carbonate) and glue, this being forced into plaster moulds backed with paper, and then removed to a drying room to harden. It is much stronger and lighter than common plaster-of-Paris ornaments, and is not so liable to chip or break if struck with anything.

Notes

References

* Yam, K.L., "Encyclopedia of Packaging Technology", John Wiley & Sons, 2009,

External links

* How cartons are made
How Paper Cartons Are Made
{{packaging Containers Paper products Paperboard packaging Domestic implements Milk containers