Questions and answers

We plan to produce quality tissue papers for daily hygiene needs both in homes and for use outside of home, including toilet tissues, kitchen towels, hand towels and industrial wipes, to name a few. A large part of these daily necessity products in the UK are currently imported, and we want to produce them locally and sustainably closer to the customers.

Goole is the perfect location for this proposed investment. The Humber region provides a crucial gateway to the whole of the United Kingdom and its ambitions to bring cutting-edge green technology and jobs to the UK matches our own, making it an obvious choice for this substantial planned investment in the UK.

We are planning to build an industry-leading mill with the best available technologies to assure safety, sustainability and efficiency with an aim to have a capacity of 240k tonnes a year. The planned mill is unrivalled in terms of scale, efficiency and production capacity in the UK.

When operating at full capacity The mill will create 400+ local jobs when at full capacity, in advanced manufacturing, engineering and managerial roles. The mill will also result in a significant level of indirect employment via the construction of the mill and jobs in the wider supply chain.

High-quality tissue paper made from pure fresh wood fibres and produced close to the markets plays an important role in our business strategy. We believe that an investment in the production of fresh fibre tissue products with modern technology is the most sustainable solution for the future. We use fresh fibres from sustainably managed forests in the Nordics as our main raw material.

Through this planned investment we will be able to move closer towards our goals to be fossil free by 2030, aiming for net zero society. One of the reasons for selecting Goole is the high levels of investment in renewables in the Humber region in recent years. We intend to make use of these renewable sources as we progress our design towards a fossil-free mill.

Sustainability is a fundamental part of Metsä’s DNA. As a business whose strategy is built on the use of wood from the Nordics as our main raw material, we rely on healthy and resilient forests and environment. We are determined to mitigate climate change and safeguard biodiversity.

We believe that resource efficiency is at the core of a sustainable bioeconomy and a circular economy. Along our entire value chain — from the forest to the end-consumer — we use sustainable and renewable raw materials, and use energy and water as efficiently as possible. We ensure that all parts of a tree are used to the purpose that fits best. We also minimize our waste and target to use all of our side streams.

We are aiming for all of our mills to be fossil fuel-free by 2030 and that includes our new planned mill in Goole.

We will use local water in the tissue manufacturing process. This will be drawn from a local source, recycled many times in the process before cleaning it on site and returning it to the local water source under license from the Environment Agency.

We take the biodiversity measures of the mill sites carefully into account and planning. Metsä Group has also recently announced that it plans to draw up biodiversity plans for all of its mill locations in Europe, numbering more than 20. The piloting starts from the Group’s latest investment project in a bioproduct mill in Kemi, Finland, which will start its operations late 2023. The measures concerning the other Metsä Group mills will be carried out gradually over the next few years, using the operating models developed in the pilot.

Tissue mills do not produce significant odours, especially when only fresh fibre is used, as in this case. Our buildings will be well-insulated to reduce noise from the manufacturing process and located far away from any site boundaries and screened with trees and natural features. Heavy goods vehicles will be enter and leave the site close to the M62 avoiding local roads.

We follow world class productivity standards to ensure our mills are safe and have no impact on public health.

Our facility will be on the outskirts of Goole and we do not anticipate any impact for Goole itself. The site has been selected as it offers us direct access to J36 of the M62 for our HGV traffic to enter and leave the site with minimal impact on local roads. We intend to draw our workforce from the local community and hope that this will lead to short commutes to work and back.