Forestry
Wood is the essential raw material for all of our virgin paper-based products. We own or lease 350,000 hectares of land in South Africa of which 245,000 is planted with hardwoods (e.g. eucalyptus) and softwoods (e.g. pine and spruce). We also hold logging rights to 1.6 million hectares of mainly softwood forests in the Komi Republic of Russia. Together, this provides an annual allowable cut of 8 million m3. This makes us potentially self-sufficent in wood for more than half our pulp-production needs.
We remain committed to a programme of forestry excellence to ensure that the productive capability, biological integrity and community needs of the forests that we own, manage or lease are considered at all times.
This means a sustained wood supply for our pulp and paper mills while maintaining high forestry standards in our own operations. We also require our contracted fibre suppliers to adhere to these standards. We have developed our own systems and procedures for the responsible procurement of wood, virgn fibre and biomass to ensure that all wood and fibre we use is always sourced from sustainably-managed forests. Full implementation of this system is expected in most areas during 2008.
Our plantations forests in South Africa were successfully awarded Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) recertification in 2007. In Russia's Komi Republic, Mondi has certified 1.6 million hectares of forests and a further 0.8 million hectares will be certified to this standard in 2008.
Each year, Mondi replenishes its forestry assets with extensive replanting programmes. In 2007, we planted more than 18,000 hectares of new trees in Russia and South Africa.
Pulp
In 2007 Mondi produced around 3.8 million tonnes of pulp, the basic ingredient of all paper and paper-based packaging, from nine integrated pulp and paper mills in Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, South Africa and Sweden. Pulp is produced from wood fibre.
Excluding Hungary, in 2007, Mondi was 96% self-sufficient in pulp for paper production.
Last change: 27/03/2008