The newsprint mill at Boyer in southern Tasmania: case study of a positive transition
In the late 1980s, the major destroyer of wilderness and oldgrowth forests in southern Tasmania was the paper mill at Boyer on the Derwent River. It was then owned by Australian Newsprint Mills (ANM) and run by Brian Gibson (a politically active figure who later went on to become a Liberal Senator for Tasmania).
ANM employed its own workforce, which logged forests of giant Eucalyptus regnans in the Styx and Florentine valleys, as well as in other parts of Tasmania’s wilderness. (Forests being logged in the Florentine had once been part of the Mt Field National Park, but had been handed over to ANM in 1950.) In the 1980s, these oldgrowth logs were ground up, pulped and turned into newsprint – a product people normally dispose of the day they buy it. Large quantities of effluent were discharged into the Derwent River, where it formed rafts of putrid sludge.
ANM was known to be struggling to remain commercially viable, a fact latched on to by anti-conservation Tasmanian MPs. The company frequently accused conservationists of harming its commercial viability. When the Federal Government flagged an inquiry into Tasmania’s Southern Forests in December 1986, ANM threatened to close down its operations – a move that the Wilderness Society described as ‘a cruel pre-Christmas hoax’.
In 1989, ANM was taken over by Fletcher Challenge, a multi-national pulp-and-paper company with operations in New Zealand, Canada and Asia. The new CEO, Graham Ogilvie, adopted a more consultative attitude towards the conservation movement than did his predecessors and actively engaged conservation groups in discussing the company’s plans for a light-weight coated paper plant.
More significantly, he invested $250 million in upgrading the company’s aging newsprint mill. Effluent treatment was greatly enhanced; the rafts of foul-smelling sludge became a thing of the past. In addition, the mill’s use of oldgrowth forests ended in 1991. Since then, it has relied on pine plantations, eucalypt regeneration and recycled paper. This investment in the mill’s operations also improved the company’s commercial performance, and within a year, it was exporting telephone-book paper to Hong Kong. Conservation groups warmly welcomed the company’s progress.
The mill was subsequently sold to Norske Skog and the operations remained consistent. There have not been major environmental impacts of the mill, so there has been a generally positive or neutral relationship with conservation groups. Unfortunately, most of the oldgrowth and wilderness areas previously within ANM’s ‘concession’ were not protected when it made its transition. They are now being managed by Forestry Tasmania for production of pulpwood and sawlogs for Gunns.
Norske Skog has now further upgraded the Boyer mill making it a thermo-mechanical operation, significantly reducing the amount of effluent produced. This change has enabled the mill to be based only on recycled fibre and plantation wood, no longer using any native-forest wood.
The ANM case study is relevant to the current situation with Gunns. Gunns is destroying oldgrowth and wilderness; it is attempting to build a chlorine-bleaching pulp mill dependent on native forests; its board members include a former Liberal Premier (Robin Gray) who appears to have political points to make against conservationists; it has a hostile attitude to the objectives of conservationists, and to conservationists themselves (as shown by the ‘Gunns20’ litigation).
Yet, in the same way that ANM was changed by Fletcher Challenge and now Norske Skog, Gunns can also be transformed.
Paul Oosting
Pulp mill and corporate campaigner
The Wilderness Society