Wood – The sustainable choice Metsä Wood

WOOD – THE SUSTAINABLE CHOICE

Metsä Wood uses the finest wood from the northern forests to supply environmentally friendly wood-based products for construction, industrial customers and distributor partners across Europe. Peter Mercer reports.

Metsä Wood is a major wood products supplier in Europe. It specialises in serving the needs of the building and construction industry with products and systems for roofs, walls, floors, frames and facades as well as producing a wide range of products for its distribution customers, including interior cladding and flooring and garden decking. It also supplies rough sawn timber, Kerto LVL and plywood to industrial customers including manufacturers of windows and doors, cladding and moulding, furniture and flooring and garden structures as well as plywood for construction and a wide variety of demanding transport applications in trucks, trains, buses, delivery vans and cargo trailers.

All of Metsä Wood’s core products use high-quality northern wood as a raw material. Thanks to the slow growth of trees in the northern forests, the company’s premium products are exceptionally durable, making them ideal for a wide range of highly demand-

ing applications and end-uses. For the home owner Metsä Wood’s products also have the advantage of presenting a very attractive appearance. Environmentally aware customers also appreciate that the timber raw material absorbs carbon dioxide as the trees grow in sustainably managed forests and this remains in the wood products for their entire lifetime.

Metsä Wood reaches its customers through a comprehensive service network in more than 20 countries. In 2013 its sales were €897m and it employed around 2500 people. The company is a core business of Metsä Group, a Finnish forest industry group, whose products include tissue and cooking papers, consumer packaging paperboard, pulp wood products as well as wood supply and forest services. The Group’s total sales in 2013 were €4.9bn and it employs approximately 11,000 people.

Metsä Group’s parent company is owned by 123,000 Finnish forest owners, and good cooperation with them guarantees the supply of certified wood raw material for production.

Pine and spruce products

Metsä Wood’s core products include Nordic Premium Timber, plywood and Kerto LVL. High quality pine and spruce timber is used in all areas of construction as well by the manufacturers of furniture, windows and packaging materials. Metsä Wood’s plywoods are also made from uniform quality spruce or birch; their production draws on more than a century of Finnish plywood manufacturing tradition brought up-to-date by intensive R&D. The strength, durability and easy handling of the company’s plywood panels make them ideal for a wide variety of demanding applications.

Kerto is produced from 3mm rotary-peeled spruce veneers glued together to form a homogenous bonded structure. It is produced in three different types that offer technical performances specifically suited to joists, lintels, roof and flooring panels and stud in both load-bearing and non-load bearing structures. Thermo Wood is thermally modified wood; its excellent durability, dimensional stability and insulating qualities as well as its long-lasting ‘new’ appearance make it ideal for both outdoor uses and interior decoration.

Production assets

Metsä Wood operates through 12 production plants and 16 upgrading and distribution units. “We have three major pine sawmills in Finland and two spruce sawmills. We are also managing the SVIR sawmill in Russia, and have a smaller sawmill in Estonia,” says Henrik Söderström, Metsä Wood SVP Timber and Upgrades. “Our Kerto production plants are based in Lohja and Punkaharju in Finland and together they have an output capacity of some 230,000 cubic metres. We also have two plywood mills in Finland.

“The sawmills produce rough sawn timber which then goes to our upgrading units for machining, finishing, impregnating, painting or other upgrading processes. These operations are located close to our main markets for finished products. Such units we have for example in the UK. Europe is and will remain our main market for upgraded timber products as it is for rough sawn timber but the latter is a global business and we are seeing significant growth in our sales in the Far East in particular.”

Last year Metsä Wood completed a €30m investment in its sawmill at Vilppula, Finland. The project at the mill, which now has an annual capacity of 450,000m3 a year, included a new infeed, saw line and green sorting lines. “This is a strategically important investment for Metsä Group because it allows us to maximise the processing value of wood raw material,” said Kari Jordan, president and CEO of Metsä Group. “The new flexible saw line replaces two old ones, substantially increasing the sawmill’s production efficiency.”

“The investment has made the Vilppula sawmill the most modern in the world,” adds

Henrik Söderström. “The speed of the old saw lines was 60 metres per minute whereas the new single line can run at a maximum of 180 metres a minute. Also, production flexibility and efficiency have been hugely increased, giving us a greater ability to respond to varying customer needs.”

Product development

As a European leader in engineered wood products, investing in research and continuous product development is vital for Metsä Wood’s ability to meet the increasing requirements of its customers. The company focuses its R&D on two sites; the development centre for engineered wood products is located at the Kerto LVL mill in Lohja and development work on special plywood is carried out at the plywood mill in Suolahti.

New products from Metsä Wood include Spruce MouldGuard, a surface impregnated softwood plywood that significantly reduces the risk of mould growth in comparison to unprotected plywood panels. The panels are strong, light, rigid and easy to install using conventional woodworking tools and fasteners. FireResist is a new surface impregnated softwood plywood panel with enhanced fire resistant properties. It can be used in interior applications such as wall and ceiling structures for improved fire safety.

Another key new engineered product is Metsä Wood Spruce WeatherGuard, a spruce plywood panel with a hydrophobic surface that rejects rainwater while still allowing the panel to breathe. It is an all-purpose construction panel that can be used in floor, wall and roof structures as well as agricultural structures, pedestrian bridges and renovating homes and buildings.

Sustainable products, sustainable processes

A recent example of Metsä Wood’s ability to supply wood construction products for large scale projects is its 2013 contract to provide wooden structures for the new DB Schenker terminal being built in Vantaa, Finland. The contract covers the delivery and installation of the frame, roof and exterior walls of a 12,000m2 extension to the transport and logistics company’s terminal.

“We chose Metsä Wood because the costeffectiveness, schedule and environmental values of the delivery met our needs,” said Marco Furu, real estate director at DB Schenker. “The environmental goals of our parent company, Deutsche Bahn Group, form the guidelines for our actions. Sustainably built and maintained real estate is one aspect of reaching these goals. Metsä Wood’s wooden structures’ extremely small carbon footprint in comparison with other materials on the market was an important criterion for us.”

But if the company’s products are inherently environmentally-friendly so are its investment decisions. In January 2013 it inaugurated a new bioenergy heating plant at the Kerto mill in Lohja that now supplies around 160,000 MWh of heat to the Lohja district heating network as well as process steam to the Kerto mill itself. “The new heating plant is pivotal in improving the competitiveness of the Kerto mill because most of the previous fossil fuel-based heat production is now replaced by bioenergy heat,” explains Henrik Söderström, “and, of course, the fuel it uses comes from the mill’s own by-products, supplemented by forest chips and other wood-based fuels. We calculate that our bioenergy heating plant will decrease the annual carbon emissions of the Kerto mill and the Lohja area by about 40,000 tonnes.”

Europe is likely to remain Metsä Wood’s principal market in the foreseeable future. “Our service network covers most European countries and thus we are well equipped for reliably serving our major customer segments of construction, industrial and distribution partners across Europe,” says Mr Söderström. “Our strategy is based on industrial efficiency. We have three focus areas to drive the industrial efficiency: partnerships, simplicity in operations and operational excellence. In terms of customer promise these mean commitment, reliability and quality – we believe these are all highly important attributes of an industrial supplier. In practice, these mean security of supply, lower inventories owing to high delivery reliability and qualities tailored to meet our partners’ needs. The demands of operational excellence dictate that we continuously seek to improve our environmental and safety performance throughout our operation. We have a proven track record for improving material efficiency and safety performance, particularly over the past five years. Combined with our primary raw material – renewable northern wood from sustainably managed forests – we believe these deliver an additional value to our customers.” n