MEMBER:  We have a customer that says they are receiving a 200# test box from an other box maker, but our testing indicates that the board combination consists of 36# liners and 26# medium.  How can this be valid?

RALPH YOUNG: You raise a good question and one that has been asked for almost twenty years.  Rule 41 and Item 222 require any box that carries a circular 200# test stamp to be comprised of 42# liners and 26# medium.
Period.

You have described your customer as placing boxes in a refrigerated environment and that they sometime experience box failures.  Where a box described as 32# ECT may have sometimes performed in the past, the customer is now demanding boxes with a 200# test construction.

Every corrugated construction has weight, caliper, flat crush, pin adhesion, edge crush, Mullen, and flexural stiffness.  These physical properties are common to all  structures.  So even a 200# test box may have low ECT and low box compression and still fail your customer shipping environment.  There are many reasons for box failures.  Very little has to do with the basis weights of the components.

All that maybe needed is to change to a water resistance adhesive.  The more you can tell me about temperatures, relative humidity, storage times, pallet design, pallet layers,  box dimensions, content weights.  I would be available to coordinate with your testing facility to engineer the best solutions for you and the end user.