A design testbed for eco-friendly corrugated setter tray packaging

Plain and simple, a corrugated cardboard material provides the right level of protection for goods in transit, which helps keep shipping costs down. As made mostly from wood material, a fairly renewable resource, corrugated cardboards are easily processed and also recycled into paper products and even new boxes. Moreover, thanks to the material’s durability, many corrugated packages can be reused multiple times before hitting the recycle bin, which promotes eco-friendly corrugated packaging needs for the environment with no glues or extra binding chemical included inside the packaging at all. The research in this paper proposes a tentative design testbed for a product model of setter tray, wholly made in corrugated paperboard and seated inside packaging with no additional filling material, which, after all, aids realization of a totally eco-friendly corrugated packaging design. A methodical approach, a systematic functional design framework with design thinking methodologies such as function decomposition (FD), quality function deployment (QFD), and morphological matrix, has been introduced to generate a promising concept continuously refined onto a product model. The validation of mechanical properties of the designed product for its functions as desired has been conducted by using not only a computer-aided engineering (CAE) analysis of the computer-aided design (CAD) model, but also an engineering experiment of the product prototypes made of corrugated paperboard, followed by an in-depth discussion on design contributions and future works as well.