Stora Enso invests EUR 23 million in the Varkaus containerboard site. The aim of the investment is to increase the flexibility of the product range available for customers and to grow the site’s total capacity by approximately 10%. This will also increase the use of recycled fiber in the production in addition to fresh wood fiber.
The Varkaus site produces unbleached softwood pulp and high-quality brown and white top containerboard for corrugated board, i.e. kraftliners. In addition to unbleached softwood pulp, the paper mill currently uses about one third of the total board packaging recycled in Finland as its raw material. The investment will further increase the use of recycled fiber in the site.
The Varkaus site is part of the Stora Enso Packaging Materials Division, which has extensive know-how in utilising wood fibers from product design to finished products and to recycling. Driving and enabling the recycling of paperboard packaging products is a key sustainability goal and investments to recycling capacity are a concrete way to support this goal. Stora Enso aims to achieve 100% renewable products that are fully in line with the circular economy and have positive carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.
“The investment will increase the capacity of our recycled fiber site and give us the flexibility to increase the use of recycled fiber in our portfolio. The investment will also improve production efficiency through technical changes in both the board machine and the pulp mill drying machine. Also, our flexibility to offer different product grades to customers improves and the capacity of the site increases slightly”, says Jarkko Tehomaa, Varkaus Packaging Board Mill Director from Stora Enso.
The environmental impact assessment (EIA) and the updating of the environmental permit, as well as the preparatory work for the investment, will commence immediately. The investment will proceed while the site is in normal operation and the final installations will be carried out in connection with the annual maintenance shutdown at the site in late autumn 2022.
The Stora Enso Varkaus site employ approximately 400 people. The annual production capacity of the packaging board site is 450,000 tons. Pulp, sawn timber, and veneer wood are also manufactured at the site.
Did you know?
In Finland the used beverage cartons (UBC) made of liquid packaging board are recycled in the same stream as the old corrugated containers (OCC) and Varkaus is one of the modern sites recycling this fraction. In some countries the streams are separate and Stora Enso has recently invested to an UBC recycling line in Ostroleka, Poland together with Tetra Pak to recycle the used beverage cartons from Poland and the neighboring countries.
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