Reevaluating Safety Margins in Corrugated Board Packaging

Abstract

Safety margins have long been a cornerstone of corrugated board packaging design, serving as a practical buffer against uncertainty in material properties, loading conditions, and environmental exposure. Traditionally, these margins have been expressed as single conservative factors derived from standardized laboratory tests and simplified analytical models. While effective in ensuring robustness, such an approach increasingly reveals its limitations. Modern logistics systems are characterized by strong variability, time-dependent effects, and growing pressure to reduce material consumption. This work argues that classical safety margins should be reconsidered not as fixed scalar values, but as dynamic, context-dependent constructs. A conceptual shift is proposed, moving from static safety factors toward a multidimensional safety landscape that reflects the combined influence of climate, time, geometry, and logistics-specific loading scenarios. Emerging tools in numerical modeling, sensing technologies, and data-driven analysis provide the foundation for this transition. The paper outlines the implications of such reframing for sustainable packaging design and highlights how a more nuanced understanding of safety margins can simultaneously improve reliability and reduce material overdesign.