30 July 2025
A Fact-Based Roadmap for a Sector in Transition
At Climact, we believe that effective climate action begins with facts. Our role is to bring science-based, unbiased analysis into complex debates, helping industries and policymakers make decisions grounded in data, not assumptions.
That’s the contribution we brought to this project: supporting Containerboard Europe in the development of its newly released Net Zero roadmap — a collective effort to outline a credible and transparent pathway for the sector to reach climate neutrality by 2050.
Our approach was not prescriptive. Instead, we worked from the industry’s own ambition levels and used our modelling expertise to assess how different targets and milestones would affect energy use and emissions over time. We aligned our work with the best available reporting standards and climate frameworks, ensuring it could serve as a solid reference point for both strategic planning and external communication.
The aim was to support an informed and constructive debate, within the industry and with stakeholders, by clarifying what’s possible, under what conditions, and at what cost.
A Crucial Milestone in a Changing Policy Landscape
This roadmap comes at a time of political recalibration. While momentum behind the European Green Deal has slowed, the pressure on industry to decarbonise remains high. The EU is now pivoting toward more targeted instruments, including the upcoming Clean Industrial Deal, which aims to support sectors most exposed to transition risks and trade pressures.
At the same time, mechanisms like the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) are redefining competitiveness for carbon-intensive sectors. And the recent Draghi report on the future of European competitiveness reinforces this direction: it calls for smart, strategic support to help industrial sectors decarbonise — and explicitly includes pulp and paper among the energy-intensive industries requiring attention.
In this evolving context, the containerboard sector faces a dual challenge: to maintain its central role in Europe’s packaging and circular economy, while aligning with long-term climate objectives.
This roadmap is the industry’s collective response — and a step toward that alignment.
What we did and how
Climact led the technical and analytical work for the roadmap, in close collaboration with Containerboard Europe, member companies, and an expert group representing the diversity of the value chain.
- We started by reconstructing the sector’s carbon footprint going back to 1996, enabling us to understand historical trends in emissions and energy use. One striking finding: direct fossil emissions have already decreased by around 40% per ton of product, thanks to improved energy efficiency and a gradual shift away from fossil fuels.
- Together with the expert group, we identified 24 levers across the value chain that could reduce emissions — from electrification and process upgrades to alternative fuels and improved circularity.
- For each lever, we worked with stakeholders to define ambitious but realistic targets, informed by technical and economic feasibility. These targets formed the basis of a Net Zero scenario, built through our in-house modelling tools.
The result is a roadmap that not only reflects the sector’s ambitions, but translates them into quantified impacts on emissions, energy demand, and technology shifts — providing a concrete foundation for action.
Key Insights from the Scenario
The scenario produced several important findings, both for the industry itself and for its wider stakeholders:
- Reducing direct fossil emissions by over 80% by 2050 is achievable, provided the right combination of solutions is deployed — including process efficiency, electrification, decarbonised electricity, and switching from fossil fuels to bio-based or hydrogen-based alternatives.
- Some residual fossil emissions will remain, particularly from fossil components in external waste used for energy. These will need to be neutralised through bioenergy with carbon capture (BECCS) — a technology particularly relevant to containerboard mills given their high levels of biogenic CO₂.
- Biogenic emissions are a major share of the sector’s footprint, due to the use of wood-based fibres and biomass energy. This makes sustainable biomass sourcing essential to achieving a credible Net Zero trajectory.
These findings also shed light on the infrastructure, regulatory, and financial support that will be needed to unlock the transition — from access to low-carbon electricity and clean fuels, to investment in carbon capture and fair access to EU transition funding.
A shared vision, grounded in reality
At Climact, we see our role as helping industries develop strategies that are ambitious, science-based, and credible — not only to meet future compliance requirements, but to build internal alignment and external legitimacy.
This roadmap does just that. It defines a shared vision for the sector, backed by data and developed collectively. It identifies what is technically possible, where the main challenges lie, and what support will be needed to succeed.
But it is also clear-eyed about the scale of the transformation. These changes are massive. They will take time, investment, and collaboration. Public support will be essential — but so will sector ownership, commitment to rigorous progress tracking, and management of environmental trade-offs and externalities.
This roadmap is not a final answer — it’s a foundation. A reference point for companies to translate ambition into action. A tool to engage with suppliers, regulators, and investors. And a step toward an industry that is not only circular, but also climate neutral.
Download the roadmap here : Roadmap
