Water is a necessity for everything that lives and grows on our planet, and it also has an important role in the paper-manufacturing process. These are some actions we undertake to reduce our environmental impact on the watercourses and the surrounding countryside:

The Environmental Centre at our mill in Munkedal displays different methods of reducing the environmental impact of paper production processes. Much work and investigation have gone into developing methods for cleaning and re-using our process water – to ensure respect for the environment. This is achieved by biological purification, and our Environmental Centre’s exhibition hall is built next to the large ponds that make up the final stage of the purification process. As a result of our work the ponds are now home to fish, crustaceans (Daphnia) and frogs. In fact, the water is so clean that you can drink it after just one filtering.

Gullmarn. At Arctic Paper Munkedals, on the Örekil River upstream from Gullmarn fjord, a number of projects have been undertaken since the sixties to minimise discharge affecting these sensitive waters – important for salmon and other wild species. Our efforts have been focused on developing the paper production processes to use less water and introducing biochemical cleaning processes. We are now working to reach our objective of a totally closed water system at the mill, and to eliminate all discharge into the Örekil River and Gullmarn.

The Oder and Warta Rivers. For environmental reasons, we have installed a gas-fuelled heat and power plant at our paper mill in Kostrzyn. The electrical energy and process steam was previously supplied by an old coal-based plant. Today, our mill in Kostrzyn is one of the few companies in Poland that has received a full certificate for OHSAS 18001, ISO 14001, ISO 9001 and EMAS.