TALLINN - Although Finland's Metsaliitto has dropped plans to build a pulp mill in Latvia, a similar operation could still spring up somewhere else in the Baltics, Margus Kohava, CEO of Estonian Cell, said last week.
He said that the Baltics' promising infrastructure and availability of raw materials would tempt another company to take over Metsaliitto's original plans. "There wouldn't have been any interference for us anyway," Kohava told the Baltic News Service. "They would have used spruce and birch timber for their raw materials, while we use aspen."
A year ago Metsaliito agreed with the government to construct a pulp mill in the Ozolsala area of eastern Latvia. But the situation changed when the environmental department banned the company's proposed bleaching method, as it would have endangered the Daugava River's ecological system and fishery resources.
Kohava said that strict environmental requirements might not have been the only thing that had pushed Metsaliito to drop its plans, though he declined to go into detail. The company had promised to invest 900 million euros into the project 's by far the biggest potential investment in Latvia.
Estonian Cell laid the cornerstone of its aspen pulp facility in Kunda last December. Plant completion is scheduled for the first half of 2006. The facility will boast an annual capacity of 140,000 tons of aspen pulp 's the raw material for quality paper. Estonia would presumably supply the material, about 400,000 cubic meters of wood.
The project's sum total comes to nearly 2.4 billion kroons (153 million euros), the country's second biggest industrial facility to be built with foreign investment. Norway's Larvik Cell initiated the project, with help from the Austrian pulp firm Heinzel Group and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
