Packaging giant Smurfit Kappa has invested more than €30 million to boost the circularity of production processes at its Sangüesa and Nervión paper mills in Spain.
The initiative is part of Smurfit Kappa's efforts to achieve its sustainability goals, it said in a statement.
The company inaugurated two state-of-the-art investments at its paper mills in Sangüesa and Nervión.
Over 12,000 solar panels were unveiled at the Sangüesa paper mill, which will work alongside its biomass and recovery boilers to generate more than 50% of its annual energy requirements, the equivalent to powering 3,600 homes, the company noted.
The photovoltaic system is expected to reduce the mill’s annual CO2 emissions by over 3,000 tonnes and represents an investment of €6 million.
The Sangüesa paper mill has reduced CO2 emissions by more than 51% since 2005.
Clean Energy Technologies
Javier Rivas, COO of Smurfit Kappa Paper and Board Europe, said, “The recent inauguration of both the Sangüesa and the Nervión investments are milestones for the Smurfit Kappa paper division and aligned with the EU Green Deal’s transition to climate neutrality through increasing clean energy technologies.”
Smurfit Kappa has invested €27 million in its Nervión paper mill to implement a fully circular production process, involving what the company described as its biggest landfill reduction project to date.
The project will remove around 75,000 tonnes of waste from landfill, and eliminate approximately 450,000km per year in road transport, the company noted.
Garrett Quinn, chief sustainability officer at Smurfit Kappa, added, “These two projects demonstrate the group’s continued investment to deliver on its sustainability goals with over €30 million in these two projects alone, delivering reduced emissions, and increasing the circularity of our production process.”
