Tobacco Asia

44 tobaccoasia Issue 1, 2025 January / February By Thomas Schmid Singapore-based Filtrona is one of the world's foremost filter manufacturers for tobacco prod- ucts. And according to Hugo Azinheira, the com- pany's global director for innovation and ESG, a revolution is currently developing in this product segment: the return of crimped paper filters. "We do believe that there is a trend now where the industry and some of the players are look- ing more seriously for plastic free substrates," said Azinheira in a recent interview with Tobacco Asia. "And that's where crimped paper rods would fit in." Back to the past Interestingly, manufacturing tobacco filters from crimped, molded, and compressed specialty paper is not a new but rather a historical technology. Be- fore cellulose acetate tow became ubiquitous in the tobacco industry in the 1950s, paper was in fact the material of choice for filters. "[In 2024,] Filtrona celebrated 100 years since the first industrial filter was produced in our factory in the UK in 1924," said Azinheira. "That first filter was actually made out of what we call a non-woven, which can be understood as being paper. The crimping actually prepares the paper, the substrate, then to be molded into that cylindri- cal [filter] rod." When Filtrona, in 2019, began looking into developing filter products that would be plastic- free, biodegradable, and sustainable to address the European Union's Single Use Plastic Directive (SUPD) requirements, nonwoven substrates – i.e. paper – were recognized as being ideal for that purpose. The result of that r&d is the company's expanding ECO range of filter products, all of them using crimped paper in one form or another. "We looked into what the industry had been using in the past and before cellulose acetate tow, so we wouldn't need to reinvent the wheel," said Azinheira. It was then when the company discovered that it still had machines from that pre-acetate period, and which had been originally engineered specifically for non-wovens. "They obviously have been highly modified since the 1950s," said Azinheira, "but we realized that we actually just needed to go back 50 years or so, look at the technology of that time and bring There are strong signs that the industry is veering away from cellulose acetate and towards paper filters. Paper Filters: A Revolution in the Making? Crimped Paper ECO Capsule Triple. Crimped Paper ECO Flute. Crimped Paper ECO Active.

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