Royal request to open £400 million paper mill
PALM Paper is hoping the Queen will officially open its £400 million mill at Lynn in June next year.
Owner Dr Wolfgang Palm revealed that the Queen has been asked to perform the honours when he showed the Lynn News round the vast building this week to see how installation work is virtually complete.
Construction of all the buildings has finished and there is less than a fortnight's work remaining before all the machinery is in place. Engineers are on site as the project moves into a two-month start-up and testing of equipment phase.
Dr Palm said work was on schedule to begin production in mid-September. "We have extremely good employees and they are working very hard – it may be that we can start up earlier," he said.
"They have picked up very easily, and quicker than we thought, all the know-how of the papermaking. They are a really great team and we are keen to start the biggest newsprint paper machine in the world with them."
He said the company does its utmost to develop and maintain the highest safety standards and, so far, there have been no major injuries among the 1,200 people who have been working on site.
Palm Paper will be employing 150 people at its mill – more than 80 per cent of them from West Norfolk – and 128 have already started. Most of the training has finished and the employees are now involved in the testing.
The mill will be working round-the-clock every day of the year on a five-shift system, with five employees for every job. At any time, only 13 people are needed to run the whole set-up.
Dr Palm explained: "Fifty years ago, the men were standing at the machine operating it manually. Now it is completely computerised and the paper engineers sit in the office, in a nice environment with air conditioning, operating everything by computer."
Asked about rumours of a second mill being built, he said: "We have to wait for the economic situation to stabilise and then see if there's room for a second machine."
Dr Palm said UK newsprint consumption has been dropping, but Palm Paper has a full order book this year and long-term commitments from UK publishers for the mill's future production.
Waste paper will begin arriving on site in a fortnight. Eventually, 60 lorries a day will be taking about 1,000 tonnes of old newspapers and magazines to the site to be turned into 800 tonnes of newsprint for the national and regional presses. It takes only an hour to create the huge reels.
The effluent treatment plant, which cleans and oxygenates the water after it has been used in the mill, starts up in August.
Dr Palm said the company will be drawing freshwater from the Flood Relief Channel and every litre will be used 50 times before it goes to the effluent plant for biological treatment.The water quality of the Great Ouse will not change.
He pointed out that the paper drying process creates humidity and people may see vapour clouds over the paper machine building at times as this is released to the atmosphere – but it is only pure condensation and nothing to worry about.
And although the paper machine is extremely loud when running, there should be no noise outside because concrete has been used in constructing all the buildings, including the roofs.
Customers, councillors and local people have visited the mill during its construction, and the final group to be shown round will be a VIP party from the Lynn News parent company, Johnston Press, today.
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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