14 June 2023: The Alizay hub realises a strong circular concept. On an annual basis, the site will reuse 550,000 tonnes of recovered paper coming from a 250-km radius around the mill, minimising CO2 emissions from production and transport. In turn, a biomass boiler and a water treatment plant produce green energy used during the paper production process.

Meanwhile, the new paper machine is in start-up and creates an additional annual production capacity of 500,000 tonnes of recycled paper for corrugated board. Together with VPK’s six other paper mills, this accounts for an annual production of 2,000,000 tonnes, of which 1,000,000 tonnes in France.

Thanks to VPK’s integrated model, Alizay’s additional paper production will mainly find outlets in VPK’s packaging processing sites in France and the UK. In this way, the group is strengthening its integration and reducing its dependence on external paper suppliers.

Further expansion of the cores division in Portugal and Spain
In March this year, VPK Group completed the acquisition of the Arteche Paper group. This further expands its cores division with an additional paper mill in Porto and five converting sites in Portugal and Spain. With this acquisition, Corex, VPK Group’s cores division, includes 4 paper mills that supply the raw material for processing at the 29 converting sites.

Committed to the energy transition
Together with specialised teams, the company continue to work on its own energy transition to increase the contribution to Europe’s Green Deal objectives of being the first carbon-neutral continent by 2050.

To achieve this goal, the group is implementing several renewable energy and decarbonisation projects. For example, gradually switching to biomass, co-generation and efficient use of recovered heat from production processes at all the sites.