Finnish forest

Forests are an important natural resource for Finns that have generated well-being for society for decades. Family forestry is a typical and unique feature of forest management in Finland. It dates back to the forestry policy of the 1920s. Back then, crofters – tenant farmers on large estates – were granted ownership of the land they had been cultivating and the forests they had been managing.

Of the wood that Metsä Group uses, 80 per cent is sourced from Finnish forests, mostly from those of the nearly 100,000 owner-members of Metsäliitto Cooperative. Owner-members bring continuity and a long-term perspective to our operations. Through the cooperative, we have access to large volumes of high-quality northern wood, which we use as efficiently as possible in the different stages of the wood value chain.

We provide the owner-members of the cooperative with a diverse range of opportunities for profitable, environmentally sound forest management. In Finland, each tree felled is replaced with four new saplings in the forest. Wood supply tracking systems enable us to trace each batch of wood all the way to the stump. We support PEFC and FSC certification. According to calculations, forest growth in Finland is 40 per cent higher than the use of forest resources.

Northern wood

Finland is located in a climate zone that has frosty winters and warm summers. As summers last for just 100 days, it may take 60–120 years for a Finnish tree to reach its full height. As a result of the short growing season, Finnish trees have special qualities. Metsä Group has extensive expertise to make use of these qualities.

As a result of the short growing season in the north, even our pulps have special qualities. Birch pulp, for example, is an excellent raw material for paperboard and certain speciality papers, particularly because of its strength. The strong fibre from birch enables us to produce paperboard that is as rigid and lightweight as possible. Birch pulp also brings good weight properties to products.

Northern softwood fibre, Metsä Fibre’s main product, is rapidly refined in paper machine processes and reaches a specific tensile strength very quickly. This allows customers to produce, for example, sufficiently strong tissue paper products while using little refining energy. The favourable refining properties result from the structure of northern softwood: with the short growing seasons, most of the wood is springwood, which has thin fibre walls.