We have a history of passion d innovation. We are proud to share it with You.
Our History
Forty years of experience has made Karton become a leading business in the manufacture of solid and corrugated polypropylene (PP) sheets.
This family business was set up some fifty years ago by two brothers, Matteo and Roberto Bressan, who were previously involved in the management of transport services. At first, Karton transformed carton packaging, hence the origin of the company's name. Our company was the first in Italy to understand the increasing need for customised packaging solutions for the furniture industry, at the apex of its expansion at that time, especially in North-East Italy.
Our previous experience acquired thanks to logistics offered additional expertise that was useful to help the furniture business clientele solve the technical problems related to the design of packaging and management of transport issues.
The first successful step was made in 1978 thanks to a pioneeristic idea, in fact Matteo – a man with a great vision and spirit of observation – had an intuition ahead of the times, when he encountered a new Japanese patent during a trade fair.
A brand new technology, consisting in the extrusion of corrugated PP sheets made its first appearance in Europe. All the interesting features of corrugated cardboard (light, easy to transform, protective...) combined with the superior mechanical properties of polypropylene (greater resistance to impacts, waterproof, recyclable).
The newly-born material proved to offer a wide range of advantages compared to corrugated carton. Soon, where the market was still unable to compete only because of the higher cost of PP against carton, Cartonplast® (PP sheet) was adopted as re-usable packaging. The rest is history.
Such an innovative project was held in high consideration, but at that same time it was ambitious considering that the Cartonplast® market was practically nonexistent and needed to be developed from scratch. In less easier times, by investing in R&D, thanks to an unwavering tenacity aiming at perfecting products, such efforts were finally rewarded. Karton soon mastered the techniques of extruding corrugated and solid polypropylene sheets, becoming the indisputable leader in Italy and all over Europe in the production of re-usable packaging.
Just like our ideas so ahead of the time, so have some strategic partnerships supported our company's success. In the Eighties, our collaboration with a major multinational company of the beverage sector such as Heineken proved to be crucial, in fact a particularly successful product was developed, i.e. the re-usable PP layer pad. Karton made important steps from a qualitative point of view thanks to the collaboration with the Zanussi Group for whom refrigerator components were manufactured.
In the Eighties, Karton aimed with foresightedness at the internationalization of business, becoming well-established in European markets starting from the German speaking countries. It was indeed in Germany, a country that has always had a very advanced approach to sustainability, where we established a layer pad pooling business for the major glass manufacturers. This was when the Cartonplast Group was established becoming a successful multinational group in the following years present all over Europe, in North America and Russia.
We then focused on the development of other fields of business: food industry, electrical household appliances, automotive industry, agriculture and building, with an increase of turnover and know-how encompassing a wide range of products.
Such developments have always gone hand in hand with our continuous commitment to meet our customers' needs achieving a certified Management System in compliance with the standards ISO 9001, ISO 22000, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001.
Karton keeps on developing and firmly believes in a model of sustainable growth, both from an economic and environmental point of view.
In our 2 production units located in Sacile and S. Giorgio di Nogaro, Karton is equipped with extremely modern PP recycling systems, where products at the end of their lives, such as PP layer pads or pallets, turn into new ones made from recycled materials. A virtuous circle, a ‘cradle to cradle' approach that keeps us up to date with the ecologically sustainable vision of our time, and that has made us for 30 years the pioneers of Circular Economy thanks to our re-usable and long-life packaging solutions.
Now, as then, our strength lies in reliability, innovation and quality.
Dynamism and flexibility are the specific features that have been combined with an advanced and efficient manufacturing technology.