Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 12
Pulp and paper industry - trends for the future
Erik Dahlquist & Jochen Bundschuh
We have seen a strong expansion of pulp and paper production during the last 20 years in especially
Asia and South America. Many new pulp mills have been erected in Indonesia and Brazil where
relatively cheap and fast growing species like Eucalyptus has become very important. Other
species like Acacia and hard wood from natural forests have increased.
At the same time, many old mills are closed in Europe and NorthAmerica as they get difficulty
to compete. The more expensive wood species as well as higher salaries and often oldmachines are
important factors, but the fact that pulp and paper industry have difficulties to compete on capital
for investments in e.g. the US, Canada and Europe makes it difficult to enhance the production
also in some existing mills. Due to expanding markets in the “new” economies in China, India and
Brazil and many other countries, the demand for paper is increasing there. As fiber is a limited
resource, recycling of used fibers is becoming even more important.
At the same time, we can see that the use of newsprint paper is decreasing due to competition
fromelectronicmedia, while packagingmaterial aswell as tissue is increasing. In theUS newsprint
sales have gone down by 48%between 2005 and 2010 (Thorp, 2010). In SPCI (2011), a prediction
has been made about when newsprint will be “insignificant”. This will be so already by 2017 in the
US with the present trend! In UK we will be there in 2019 and in Canada and Norway in 2020. To
meet these new demands the large pulp and paper corporations are specializing into more narrow
segments of the market. Storaenso for instance is concentrating a lot of their efforts into packaging
according to Jouko Karvinen, CEO (Karvinen, 2011). Due to poor economic conditions in North
America Storaenso is also leaving this continent at least concerning production units. Instead,
they expand in China, Brazil and in the future also in India, where the markets are growing.
Borregard has concentrated a lot on dissolving pulp/viscose and has several partners in different
countries. One of them is SAPPI who is now also focusing on dissolving pulp, especially in their
South African mills and in the US (SAPPI, 2011).
Borregard as well as Domsjö are also producing many different chemicals like lignosulfonate,
ethanol and Borregard also Vanilla. As they have sulfite processes this fits very well, and is quite
different from many other companies. They are leading the trend towards biorefineries.
SCA is concentrating on fine paper and hygiene products (SCA, 2011) but also wind power
production in a large on-land wind power farms in Northern Sweden. Södra, owned by the forest
owners in Sweden, is concentrating on long fiber pulp for especially the European market. They
have no intention to produce paper, as they primarily want to have someone buying their forests
to a good price. Energy is important for them, so thus they cooperate with Statkraft on forest
based wind power parks at their forest owners land. Another group, Korsnas, is focusing on liquid
board, where Tetrapak is the main customer. Here the strategy is to have a few large plants where
the production is highly automated. The owners are actually investing a lot in TV-channels, the
METRO journal and telephone companies, as a side activity to the pulp and paper. The company
also is selling surplus heat to the local municipality, Gavle. UPM has many mills producing
printing paper in a declining European market for this type of products. Thus, mills are closing.
For the future integration of biomass use for energy and other applications is of interest (Arve,
2001a,b), and the company owns part of a new nuclear power plant in Finland. Other products are
Labels and Plywood that can be formed. The company also is expanding in China, where printing
papers is still growing fast. In the future, there will be new products for energy, bio-chemicals,
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