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Reducing climate impact from transport

In 2021 transport accounted for 20 percent of GHG emissions from Nordic Paper’s products. Raw materials and inputs, such as wood, chemicals and pulp, need to be transported to Nordic Paper’s plants and paper products need to be transported to customers. Due to longer distances, transporting finished products accounts for the majority of the Company’s transport-related GHG emissions.

Nordic Paper is constantly working on reducing the impact of purchased transport services. There is potential to do this by replacing road transport as far as possible with transport by water or rail or a combination of modes of transport. A large portion of the Company’s kraft paper volumes is already transported to the UK on two ships travelling between the port of Kristinehamn, not far from Nordic Paper’s Bäckhammar plant, and Hull in England and Montrose in Scotland.

David Högström  at Nordic Paper’s Supply Chain unit talk about the possibilities: “ After having a good experience with sea transport to the UK we are now looking into expanding to other destinations in Europe. This would significantly reduce our climate footprint.” In addition to increasing sea transport, which requires large volumes, Nordic Paper is working on combining transport modes for deliveries to customers in Europe. This will reduce costly reloading while also significantly lowering GHG emissions. In 2021 Nordic paper had more than 1,100 lorry trailers that were transported much of the way by rail. “ Although much of our active work involves reloading our lorry loads onto other modes of transport, we also have a promising opportunity to reduce climate impact from road transport. We have recently agreed on biogas fuelled trucks for the internal transportation of pulp from Bäckhammar to Åmotfors,” say David.