Both Awards have become a true testimony for the power of cooperation and resilience. You clearly can’t lock down creativity! The new Awards 2022 are already in full swing, feedback is overwhelmingly positive.

For the Pro Carton Young Designers Award, both teachers and students worked hard to uphold and to progress innovation and sustainability in packaging through the use of cartonboard. It was incredible to see the number of entries and participating schools/universities rising despite the circumstances, which included lacking access to design labs and continued home schooling during the second year of the pandemic. It is our aim that our converters will favourably look at the entries in terms of their marketability. Of course we would love to see one of the entries be commercialized.

Likewise, at the Pro Carton Student Video Award students came up with amazing video ideas, featuring the many benefits of cartons and cartonboard. The concepts were so convincing, the jury had to raise the overall award budget to assign an award to no less than three videos and rate two more each as “Highly commended” or “Commended” respectively.

Fuelled by this success, Pro Carton was eager to kick-off the awards for 2022 with the beginning of the new academic year. We simply wanted to guarantee a perfect start for the winter term with access to our support early on. We’ve never had so much positive feedback so early in the award’s timeline, giving us hope that the cooperation with design schools and universities will once more intensify this year!

Many teachers were glad to receive high-quality cartonboard sheets for the practical design work, thanks to the help of the amazing material sponsors Metsä Board and MM Board & Paper. Also in the next season, we will continue to connect teachers with our many partnering experts from the packaging industry all over Europe to hold a presentation or a workshop.

While you are reading this, our member Graphic Packaging International is holding a workshop for a class at a British university who are working on cartonboard ideas for the 2022 Pro Carton Young Designers Award. One of our partners at Artigrafiche Reggiane & Lai is supporting another course in Italy with their design expertise, and Van Genechten Packaging is working together with a design teacher in Belgium. So if you’d like to support us with your company, too, please get in touch. Knowledge is a power that can be easily shared!

We are very thankful to have so many enthusiastic and supportive partners in this process of creating Packaging for a Better World and helping universities and schools to increase the quality of their education in sustainable packaging design. For both awards, one third of the number of schools and universities from last year have already confirmed their participation in the 2022 competitions!

We’d like to share with you one of the winning videos, as in our view, it perfectly captures the spirit we need for 2022. To achieve the EU Climate Goals and to make retailers, brand owners as well as customers choose cartons, we need to dare try new things and make the impossible possible!

VIDEO

Please share the info about our awards with your contacts too!