Iggesund Further Enhances the Environmental Credentials of Its Incada Paperboard

Source from:  Tobacco Reporter  12/04/2013

At the end of September, Iggesund Paperboard launched upgraded versions of its folding box boards, Incada Excel and Incada Silk, which are said to be whiter and lighter than they previously were and offer improved printability and runnability. "The whiteness improvement," according to an Iggesund press note, "amounts to 7.5 units on the CIE (Commission Internationale de l'Elcairage color model) scale and most of it lies in the L [luminance] value, which is critical for color reproduction."

The upgraded boards were presented during a customer day at Iggesund's mill in Workington, Cumbria, U.K., where all of the company's Incada board is produced. The day was focused on what were called packaging customers, but Iggesund emphasized that the latest improvements would be introduced also in respect of tobacco-industry boards. Iggesund had a well-established prod uct portfolio for tobacco, sold under the Incada Silk name, which now would be upgraded, said Arvid Sundblad, business director for tobacco. "In Incada Silk we have a product that fulfills the high demands of the tobacco market in all visual and sensory areas," he said. "In addition, the product performs well in the printing and packing processes." 

Nevertheless, arguably the most interesting aspect of the day, as far as tobacco manufacturers were concerned, had to do with learning firsthand about the mill's environmental and sustain-ability credentials. Tobacco manufacturers have a good record when it comes to sustainability, both in respect of their own pro-cesses and when it comes to managing their supply chains, but at Workington, Iggesund has taken what can only be described as a giant leap forward. And perhaps this should come as no surprise. For 2011, the Holmen group, of which Iggesund is a part, was judged to have produced Sweden's best sustainability accounting.

In fact, according to the press note, the biggest change of all for Incada has had no effect at all on printability or the economy of customers' own processes; rather it concerns the fact that the Workington mill earlier this year changed its energy source from natural gas, a fossil fuel, to biomass, which is burned in a new combined heat and power plant. Overnight, the mill eliminated its annual fossil carbon emissions from more than 190,000 tons, the press note said. The reduction was the equivalent of the annual emissions from more than 65,000 cars each driven 20,000 km a year.

"Paperboard in general is a very sustainable packaging mate-rial," said Robin Lewis, product manager for Incada. "By chang-ing our energy source and upgrading Incada, we are now at the summit of the folding box board market in terms of both product properties and sustainability."

Sheep and willow

I read the above press note while waiting in the foyer of a hotel at the Manchester airport as I, along with other journalists and Iggesund customers, prepared to be taken by coach on a three-hour journey to Workington. This was to be an interesting journey that took us through part of the Lakes District, which is applying, for the fourth time, to be recognized by the United Nations as a world heritage site. The Lakes District is England's biggest national park and generally recognized as one of the most beautiful places the country has to offer. It is a place that has inspired poets—well, at least William Wordsworth—famously to wander "lonely as a cloud."

But all is not well in paradise, apparently, and not only because this is one part of the world where, if you were a cloud, you would never, ever be lonely (there was a reason why Iggesund thought-fully kitted us each out with an umbrella and hooded coat). Writing in The Guardian at the beginning of September, the envi-ronmentalist George Monbiot described the Lakes District as "one of the most depressing landscapes in Europe." In part, his concern is that the region has been deforested and is kept deforested by the huge numbers of sheep that it supports and that mow down "every edible plant that shows its head." The forests that once covered the region's fells had been reduced by the white plague to bare rock and bowling green, he wrote.

Although the Lakes District is for me a beautiful place, you don't have to be there for long to see what Monbiot is on about. An hour out of Manchester, the sheep population starts to increase noticeably, and this is one of the notes that I made during the jour-ney: "Some of the hills are odd. They look smooth and marbled, as if your mother had been folding egg whites into a particularly large and heavy cake mix."

What has this got to do with Iggesund, Incada and its biomass plant? Well, the company currently sources its fuel for the plant—bark and off-cuts from the logs it uses to manufacture its board, along with sawmill byproducts, forest residues and energy crops—from forests and sawmills in the north of England and Scotland, but it would like to have as much of that fuel sourced from as close to the plant as is possible. And for that reason it is trying to encour-age local landowners to grow willow, as it has done itself on a 10 ha site around the plant that acts in part as a demonstration plot. Willow, which has a high calorific value and low water content, thrives in the cool, wet conditions of Cumbria.

If Iggesund could encourage a good number of farmers to grow willow in this way, it would help improve the environmental credentials of the plant further while cutting its costs, and it would presumably partly assuage Monbiot's concerns by encouraging a little more biodiversity. I say "partly assuage" because it would not be a case of growing willow trees on a long-term basis, but willow shrubs, which would be coppiced after the first three years and then each two to three years for about 20–25 years, at which time the willows would have to be dug up and replaced by another crop.

I say partly assuaged also because some of the land so planted might not be in the Lakes District, though some would be because there is something like a 100 km catchment area around the mill in which it would be viable to produce willow for fuel. This is because the Workington mill is not in the Lakes District, though it is close by. It is situated just outside the town of Workington "between the shore of the Irish Sea and the Lakes District," as one Iggesund publication put it rather poetically—though rather more Louis MacNeice than Wordsworth, according to my tin ear.

There is something fascinating about visiting the Workington plant and learning about how in 21st century Britain people might earn their living, or part of their living more likely, growing wil-low as a fuel. But this is not a cut-and-dried project yet, and it has fallen to Neil Watkins, alternative fuels manager at Workington, to convince farmers in the area that they should abandon their traditional crops and make a 20-year commitment to growing willow as an energy crop.

There are advantages for the farmer. As Watkins points out, energy crops provide a way to diversify without taking on much risk, and they can be grown on less fertile and even boggy ground, so they don't compete with food production. Despite this, previous energy crop projects in Cumbria have failed due to the unpredict-ability of harvesting costs.

But this is where Iggesund and Holmen come into their own. The Holmen Group is one of Sweden's biggest forest owners, and, as such, has a wealth of knowledge about forest management, including harvesting, as anyone who has visited the Invercote board plant at Iggesund, Sweden, can attest. Given this, Iggesund is able to make farmers an offer that includes taking responsibility for harvest and transport costs, while guaranteeing them a return on their investment, index linked during the contract period. The company calls the offer "Grow Your Income" and says that it is particularly attractive for older farmers interested in less work-intensive crops.

Good business

However, I wouldn't want to make it sound as though Iggesund had become a charitable organization helping to support hoary farmers, angry environmentalists and itinerant poets. Far from it. The company intends to make a profit even out of the 10 ha plot of willow that it is growing. And Ulf Löfgren, the former finance director of the Workington mill who recently took over as man-aging director from Ola Schultz-Eklund, described as "good" the return on investment of the £108 million ($173.15 million) the company poured into the biofuel boiler project.

"Thanks to investments spanning more than a decade, Iggesund Paperboard has raised the standard of what was a very middle-of-the-road paperboard mill to one that is state of the art," said Löfgren. "Including the £108 million spent on the biofuel boiler, we have invested more than £200 million in this transformation.""In our investment in the new biofuel boiler, profitability and reduced climate impact go hand in hand. We know that the cost of fossil-based energy will rise faster than that of biofuel, so we regard this investment as a way to stabilize our energy costs.

"At the same time, our emissions of fossil carbon dioxide from the production process will fall to almost zero, which should reasonably make us an even more interesting choice for the large end users, who have more or less promised consumers that they will both declare and reduce the emissions created by the products they sell.

"We base our production on a renewable raw material that can later be recycled either in material or energy form. Our process meets a high environmental standard, and our paperboard is an excellent fit in a society which is taking step after step towards greater sustainability."

This is very illustrative of the situation, but you really need to be there fully to appreciate this project, which takes an ancient product of otherwise little value—basically timber detritus—and uses modern techniques to squeeze out of it every unit of energy possible. First the ancient. Part of the plant tour took participants into the A-frame storage building and stood them in front of what looked like a mountain of such detritus, or biofuel. It was a colos-sal heap, and little wonder: The plant uses 500,000 tons of such biofuel annually—that's way more than the 350,000 tons of spruce logs that are chipped each year to produce the plant's output of 200,000 tons of board.

Now, the modern. The biofuel is fed by a huge external inclined conveyor from the A-frame building into the heart of the system: a huge building, almost hospital-like in its cleanliness, with seem-ingly miles of stainless steel pipes and including at its top a bub-bling fluidized bed boiler where the fuel is burnt on a bed of sand to produce 150 MW of high-pressure steam that drives a turbine with an output of 50 MW of electrical power. About 40 MW of this energy is used to run the plant, while about 10 MW is sold to the grid. After passing through the turbine, the steam, now at a lower pressure and temperature, is directed to the board machine, where it is used to dry the board.

The building is cathedral-like in size and requires something of a leap of faith for those not familiar with architectural engineeringconcepts: The boiler, complete with the huge quantities of water that it uses, is suspended from the top of the building so as to allow for the inevitable expansion and contraction.

In fact, the building has an observation deck 46 meters high, making it the second highest man-made structure in Cumbria, the highest being one that I won't mention for fear of bringing various spooks down on me. From the top you look out over the Irish Sea, the town of Workington (previously an important coal port but one-third of whose throughput is now Iggesund-related) and one of West Cumbria's most important bird sanctuaries, a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), which is located right beside the mill.

The location of this SSSI is one of the reasons why Iggesund takes such a far-sighted view of its industrial processes. "Airborne emissions from the manufacture of Incada have an insignificant impact on the local environment," according to an Iggesund publication:  Sustainability the Incada way . "Scientists regard the return of the environmentally sensitive osprey to the Lakes District after many years' absence as a sign that the air quality has improved."

The same publication describes how the Workington mill has reduced its water consumption by more than 40 percent per ton of board produced. "This has been accomplished by reusing our process water throughout our production process," it says. "We use water in a responsible manner, recirculate it as much as pos-sible and finally purify it before releasing it into the sea."Given all of the emphasis on the biofuel system itself, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that it has a purpose: to drive the board machine, which, at 5.5 meters wide, is said to be the biggest folding box board machine in Europe. In a process that is going 24 hours a day, the machine produces a 20-ton reel containing 10 miles of board every 30 minutes. About half of the overall annual output of the plant is exported, and about one-third of it is tobacco-industry related.

It is also easy to lose sight of the fact that other investments have been made, one of which has recently involved spending  £1.8 million on a new pallet and wrapping system to improve the mill's reel and pallet presentation.

And finally, given everything that has gone on in the recent past, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that this isn't the end of the story. To a certain extent, the biofuel system is still in its startup phase, and, as Löfgren said on Thursday, Sept. 26, the day of the customer visit, by Monday, Sept. 30, the mill would be working on the next Incada improvements. Enditem