Page 10 - Packaging News Mar-Apr 2020

10 NEWS EXTRA | www.packagingnews.com.au | March-April 2020
Containerboard faces crisis after
Australia’s containerboard sector is facing an unprecedented crisis of fibre supply, with the recent bushfires wiping out huge swathes of trees used for local manufacture of kraftliner, which is used as the outer layers of high-strength corrugated boxes. Wayne Robinson writes.
THE plantation forests around the Visy mill in Tumut have been decimated, with as much as 40 per cent of the soft- wood trees impacted by the fires either destroyed or needing to be salvaged. Recovery of pulpable wood from salvage operations is uncertain.
Industry insiders say the level of plantation destruction left in the wake of this past sum- mer’s enormous bushfires is unparalleled.
The plantations serving the Australian Paper mill in the LaTrobe Valley – which supplies kraftliner to Orora’s corrugated box plants – escaped relatively unscathed, however the potential for further serious fires remains high.
The Visy mill is the country’s largest manufacturer of containerboard materials. Reports suggest that production of kraft- liner was curtailed at the facility. Visy uses mainly virgin fibre for kraftliner, and uses post-consumer paper and board to cre- ate its recycled containerboard grades at its Tumut mill. PKN understands that post- consumer paper and board was piling up at the Tumut mill.
Visy also uses the same fibre to manu- facture a range of other industrial and packaging products, including pallet slip sheets.
The containerboard manufacturers (Visy, Orora, and Australian Paper) are all major exporters. They may need to delve into this supply to meet local demand, and one industry source confirmed this was already occurring. Post-consumer
Maintaining production of high- quality kraftliner may require the curtailment of log exports to supply the Tumut mill and other facilities that rely on softwood logs and fibre.
waste recycling is already under intense pressure with the banning of waste of China and several other Asian nations meaning it cannot go offshore, and now has to be processed here.
Latest trade data indicates that nation- ally more than four million cubic metres of softwood logs were exported over the last year. The destruction of signifi- cant volumes of resource is already plac- ing those exports under scrutiny. Maintaining production of high-quality kraftliner may require the curtailment of log exports to supply the Tumut mill and other facilities that rely on softwood logs and fibre.
Quoted in Nine Media, Snowy Valleys Council mayor James Hayes, says the fire destroyed timber plantations, which will take 25 years to regrow, which means years of difficulty for the Visy paper mill and workers. “I don’t want to be alarmist, but it could be dire,” he is reported as saying.
The seriousness of the situation was evi- dent with deputy prime minister Michael