MARYVALE PRINT PAPER STAFF STOOD DOWN

Some 37 staff at Opal’s Maryvale Mill have been stood down, with a further 120 about to face the same fate, as production at Australia’s only printing papers manufacturing plant grinds to a halt.

White paper manufacturing ceased just before Christmas, with the company unable to source a new supply of logs, necessary as its previous supplier VicForests was forced to shut down operations over the impact a judge decided its logging contractors were having on a rare possum. VicForests has appealed the Supreme Court decision, which came after a years-long campaign by local activists.

The mill at Maryvale produces the Reflex copy paper, which is 80 per cent of the copy market, as well as other copy papers, and a range of UWF uncoated woodfree papers used in offset printing, and for envelopes and forms. Local paper suppliers say they have been able to source alternate product from overseas.

Unions fear the jobs, well-paid in local terms, will be permanently lost. The mill is the biggest employer in the area. The Maryvale situation represents an element of the current national debate over the environment in a microcosm; a business being forced to close, with jobs lost, while claiming its activities are not actually harmful. State-owned VicForests has the rights to manage forests, in return it gets to log about 0.1 per cent of the trees each year, most of which it says are either fallen, a bushfire risk, or stifling growth in the forest. However, activists disagree and have long been campaigning for an end to logging. Now, the paper that would have been produced locally will have to be shipped into the country, with the associated emissions from transport.

Describing the situation as ‘complex’, Opal says it has made no long-term decisions about its white paper manufacturing.

The Maryvale mill (part of Australian Paper) is owned by giant Japanese paper company Nippon Industries. The business model at Maryvale is log to paper. It could get logs from elsewhere in Australia, but the distances involved would make it uneconomic. Shipping in pulp from overseas would also be uneconomic, and supply of pulp is tight around the world, as paper companies such as Stora Enso and UPM have taken mills out of production, or switched papermaking lines to packaging grades.

Opal Australian Paper is also one of the largest users of the Port of Melbourne, exporting 88,000 tonnes of a range of premium papers to 70 countries in Asia, Europe, North and South America, Africa, and the Middle East. That will now stop.

Maryvale also produces packaging grades, known as brown paper, which are not affected, as these come from softwood trees in different areas.