In Finland, forest industry major Metsä Group’s innovation company Metsä Spring Ltd and leading Japan-headed sogo shosha, Itochu Corporation have announced the establishment of a joint venture (JV) that will invest approximately EUR 40 million in the construction and operation of a test plant to demonstrate a new technology for converting paper-grade pulp into textile fibres. The demo plant will be located at Metsä Group's Äänekoski Bioproduct mill in Äänekoski, Finland.
According to Metsä, the textile fibre demo plant is the first investment of its recently established Metsä Spring and aims to demonstrate a new technology for converting paper-grade pulp into textile fibres. Business Finland, a Finnish governmental funding agency, is participating in the financing of the estimated EUR 40 million demo project with an R&D loan.
The textile fibre demo plant will be located next to Metsä Group’s bioproduct mill in Äänekoski, Finland. Construction of the demo plant, with an annual capacity of about 500 tonnes, begins in October 2018 with startup planned in late 2019. The general engineering partner is Sweco.
With the plant, and the demonstration project related to it, we aim to prove the technical feasibility of the new textile fibre production technology. Based on the results of the demonstration project, we can then evaluate the technical and economic realities of building a clearly larger plant in Finland in the future. During the demonstration project, which is expected to last two to three years from the start-up of the plant, we will also gather customer feedback related to the new fibres, said Niklas von Weymarn, CEO of Metsä Spring.
The new technology to be studied and further developed in the demo project is based on direct dissolution using a novel solvent for the pulp dissolution stage. Metsä Group’s wet paper-grade pulp will be used as the raw material. The new technology is estimated to be more environmentally-friendly than the textile fibre production technologies currently in use.
