China’s Taison Group Orders Four Tissue Machines for the Jiujiang mill

The Taison Group is forging ahead with its tissue paper expansions in China, ordering four 60,000-tonne/yr tissue machines for its greenfield mill in Jiujiang city, Jiangxi province.

Voith has been signed up to provide the units, each with a trim width of 5.6 m and a design speed of 2,200 m/min.

The group’s tissue expansion scheme in Jiangxi came to light in October 2016 when an environmental impact assessment document was published by Jiujiang city authorities.

The file reveals that the group’s subsidiary in Jiangxi province plans to invest RMB 9.81 billion ($1.43 billion) in building a new plant which will have a 480,000-tonne/yr tissue paper capacity, and hygiene product lines capable of making 1.8 billion sanitary pads and diapers per year.

The project will be carried out in two phases, with 240,000 tonnes/yr of tissue capacity coming on stream in the first stage, and the remaining tissue capacity - as well as all the hygiene product lines - starting up in the second stage.

No detailed timeline on the expansion project has been formally disclosed, but local media reported that construction began at the beginning of this month and the first phase will be finished by the end of this year.

Based in Putian city, Fujian province, the Taison Group is also building new tissue capacity elsewhere in China. In late 2014, its subsidiary Shanghai Taison Pulp acquired Guizhou Chitianhua, a bamboo pulp producer in Chishui city, in the southwestern province of Guizhou.

Its facility is getting a pair of 60,000 tonne/yr tissue PMs from Andritz. The first unit was originally planned to start up by the end of 2016, followed by the second in 2017. But a source close to the project told PPI Asia that construction work at the site is still underway. The delay was caused by inconvenient traffic conditions, as the Chishui plant is situated in a mountainous area.