READ MORE ABOUT THE KEMI BIOPRODUCT MILL PROJECT:
“We can make wood-based products that replace fossil-based raw materials or store carbon for long periods of time.”
from customers, and the sawmill would invest heavily in drying solutions. “The end result is that the new technology will help us to make first-rate products from northern wood for demanding customer applications,” says Haapaniemi. ALL WOOD IS TRACEABLE The Kemi bioproduct mill would use some 7.6 million cubic metres of pulpwood a year, which is approximately 4.5 million cubic metres more than the current mill uses. The Rauma sawmill would use roughly 1.5 million cubic metres of Finnish logs a year. In the autumn of 2018, Natural Resources Institute Fin- land (Luke) estimated that the maximum amount of wood that could be felled sustainably in Finland each year until 2024 is 84 million cubic metres. The amount of wood felled in Finland in 2018 was 78.2 million cubic metres. If you add the raw materials needed for Kemi and Rauma to that, you come very close to the maximum limit. “The majority of the wood to be used at the Kemi bi- oproduct mill would come from Finland. The wood can be procured in a sustainable way, because the potential for pulpwood lies in Northern Finland. Ensuring the availability of the wood raw material is indeed one of the prerequisites for a decision to invest in the mill,” says Johansson. All wood purchased by Metsä Fibre is traceable. In 2018, the certification rate of the wood used by Metsä Fibre was 92 per cent. Third-party forest certification signifies sustainable forest use. The final investment decisions concerning Kemi and Rauma will be made, at earliest and respectively, in the summer of 2020 and in early 2020. •
UNSEEN SOLUTIONS IN THE SAWMILL INDUSTRY Both of these large-scale investments are being pre-engi- neered with a clean slate. This will enable the use of the latest technology. “The leaps we’re taking in technology and our opera- tions are so big that we’ll be pointing the way forward for the sawmill industry on a global scale. We’ll be creating a new, competitive concept for the sawmill sector,” says Harri Haapaniemi , Project Director of the pre-engineer- ing project of the Rauma sawmill. At Rauma, the company aims to use solutions previous- ly unseen in the sawmill industry. The aims also include making use of the lessons learned in pulp production. The model for the new sawmill includes a central control room from where the entire production process is run. The operating model emphasises doing things together, multiple skills and user maintenance, in which the oper- ating personnel is partly responsible for the preventive maintenance routines. The key technologies in the next-generation sawmill would include computer vision, smart control and robot- ics. Items that are defective or cause congestion would be identified at an early stage and removed from the line without a need to stop it. Automation would also be put to use in quality assur- ance and the packaging of products. The Rauma sawmill would be the most cutting-edge and efficient sawmill in the world. The sawmill’s target speed is a whopping 250 metres a minute – in other words nearly three times that of a conventional sawmill. The company also intends to surpass old standards in the products’ quality, which would be ensured throughout the process with the help of aids such as computer vision. Specific quality indicators and targets are common needs
Harri Haapaniemi Project Director of the pre-engineering project of the Rauma sawmill. The sawmill would be the largest, most modern and efficient single-line pine sawmill in the world.
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