ALBANESE PLEDGES $24M FOR BOYER MILL

Anthony Albanese has pledged up to $24m to Tasmania’s Boyer paper mill to transition to a low emission future, if he wins the upcoming election.

Albanese said a new Labor government will give an initial $9m, to be spent over two years, to underpin the mill’s viability as the transition happens, and speaking in Boyer on the campaign trail he said, “We’ll also provide up to $15m to match the company’s own investments in electrification that are occurring.”

The Boyer mill currently burns some 80,000 tonnes of coal a year, and is one of Tasmania’s biggest carbon emitters. When it was part of Norske Skog it accounted for a whopping two thirds of the company’s carbon that came from its five mills. By contrast Norske’s two Norwegian mills emitted just three per cent of the total figure. The other 30 per cent came from its two mills in Austria and France.

The Boyer mill is now owned by Melbourne businessman David Marriner, who bought it from Norske Skog two months ago for $27m. It is one of the biggest employers in the Derwent Valley region, with 310 staff on the books.

Marriner bought the paper mill intending to diversify into new product lines from the newsprint the mill has traditionally produced. It was Australia’s first newsprint mill when it opened almost 200 years ago, in 1841, and is now the country’s last remaining newsprint producer.

Marriner has his eye on new products for the mill, in particular looking at the 200,000 tonnes a year of white paper that used to be produced at Opal Paper’s Maryvale Mill in the LaTrobe Valley until 16 months ago, all of which has now been replaced by imports, as it was forced to stop producing.

He is also looking at adjacent products, including insulation for housing made from timber rather than petroleum products.