Stora Enso, Finland, reports that the Montes del Plata mill in Uruguay, its joint venture operation with Arauco, Santiago, Chile, has started up. The extremely modern mill, Stora Enso explains, has the best available techniques (BAT) and its design allows it to run with excellent efficiency, "doing more with less."

 

The new mill has a production capacity of 1.3 million metric tpy of bleached eucalyptus pulp with ECF light bleaching. Stora Enso’s part, 650,000 metric tpy, is sold entirely as market pulp. Energy production at the mill has been accepted as a CDM (clean development mechanism) project of the United Nations. The surplus energy of approximately 70 MW per year is sold to the national grid.

 

Montes del Plata owns 190,266 hectares of land, of which 114,656 hectares are planted, and around 100,000 hectares are protected areas. All Montes del Plata’s own eucalyptus plantations are FSC certified. The mill’s pulp wood supply comes mainly from Montes del Plata’s sustainably managed plantations.

 

The mill will be "energy independent, and will, in fact, produce more energy that it consumes, made primarily from biomass. Annually, the mill produces around 160 MW, of which (as mentioned above) some 70 mw will be sold to the national grid. The mill also operates its own deepwater port for exporting pulp. It has a barge wharf for incoming wood to minimize the amount of truck traffic on Uruguayan roads. 

 

From the Uruguayan perspective, Montes del Plata benefits the local society in economical, social, and environmental ways. First of all, according to socio-economical impact studies made by the consultant company Deloitte, the mill will boost the national economy through a 2% increase in GDP. In addition to direct economic benefits, the operations offer many job opportunities. For example, earlier many of the Uruguayan engineers had to search for job opportunities outside of their home country. When calculating the whole value chain, as well as the indirect jobs, it has been estimated that there will be more than 5,000 permanent jobs created in the country.

Through a series of extensive training sessions and daily monitoring, safety will be at the core of Montes del Plata’s working culture. The excellence of production will only be satisfying if everyone gets back home safe and sound each and every day, the mill stresses. 

Safety is the cornerstone of working practices at every Stora Enso production unit. There will be no compromises at Montes del Plata regarding the implementation of the same zero-accident policy, Montes del Plata insists.