Stora Enso Timber’s new planing mill – part of a €20m modernisation programme at Varkaus sawmill – has been opened.
The product portfolio will cover both sawn and S4S-planed products for construction industries, mainly in Europe but also the US and Japan.
The sawline capacity is now 345,000m3 a year, of which 100,000m3 will be planed products from the new mill.
As well as the planing facilities, a new log sorting line has been built, the sawline and centre piece grading have been renewed, and the grading plant has been fitted with automatic grading equipment.
The investment has enabled the company to use shorter logs which, it says, will help it secure future raw material availability.
The new machinery led to a significant retraining programme at the mill. Fourteen log sorting jobs were lost, but the new planing mill required the same number of employees and those who moved over were trained under a new apprenticeship programme.
