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SCA to Increase Recovered Paper Use at Laakirchen Mill
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Stockholm, Sweden, 02 April 2008 -- SCA’s graphic paper mill in Laakirchen is investing EUR 10 million (SEK 95 million) to increase the percentage of recycled fiber in its products. The aim is to reduce the energy consumption, pulpwood raw material use, and carbon dioxide emissions, without compromising the high quality of the products.

The mill has successfully launched a paper grade that has a high content of deinked pulp. “As a result of the favorable demand for this paper and our positive experiences of using a high proportion of recovered paper, we now need to increase our capacity for deinked pulp,” said Mark Lunabba, mill manager at SCA Laakirchen in Austria.


The investment will increase the capacity of the Laakirchen mill’s deinking plant, in which ink and contaminants are removed from newspapers and magazines recovered from Austria and southern Germany. The new facility will be ready for start-up mid 2009. It will increase the capacity of the mill’s deinking plant from today’s level of 145,000 tons to 175,000 tons per year.

Mechanical wood pulp originates from wood raw materials that have had a 30-50 percent price increase recently, and the production operations for this kind of pulp are highly energy intensive.

Two-thirds of the electrical power that the Laakirchen mill consumes is produced by the mill itself in a gas-driven power plant. The remaining one-third that is purchased on the market is expensive. The annual energy savings from replacing part of the pulp with recycled fibers is estimated to around EUR 1 million.

“Being able at the same time to reduce our consumption of energy and wood, which have both increased sharply in price, is not a disadvantage in this respect,” Lunabba said.

The Laakirchen mill was established in 1867, but the first paper machine began operation in the beginning of the 20th century. SCA acquired the mill from the Heinzel family in 1988 and today it employs approximately 580 people. The mill has 505,000 tons of annual production of supercalendered (SC) publication paper, mainly used for catalogues, magazines, and advertising material. Customers consist mainly of magazine publishers, retailers issuing catalogues, and printers in Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe.

 

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