CPH’s Paper Division has substantially reduced its greenhouse gas emissions per tonne of paper produced at its Perlen site (Switzerland), from the more than 200 kilos of carbon dioxide equivalents (CDEs) of 2011 to 114 kilos of CDEs last year.
The almost 50% reduction has been achieved through targeted actions such as substituting fossil fuels with the procurement of heating from the local Renergia waste incineration facility.
As a result, the division’s Perlen operation now generates far fewer direct emissions than the benchmark in the EU Emissions Trading System which was established on the basis of the EU27’s best 10% of facilities.
Recycling recovered paper into newsprint and magazine paper is an energy-intensive process. And CPH’s Paper Division used just under 1 200 kWh of electricity and 1 000 kWh of heating to do so per tonne of paper it produced last year. This is below the comparable values at other European paper manufacturers, confirming the high energy efficiency that the division has achieved over the past few years.
In addition to energy, the raw material of the recovered paper itself is a key cost factor in CPH’s paper production.
“Around half of all our recovered paper is sourced from Switzerland,” Peter Schildknecht explains. “We aim to increase this figure further, to shorten the transport journeys involved, which will also ease the environmental impact of our operations.”
Procuring recovered paper from outside Switzerland increases the greenhouse gas emissions entailed by some 65%, through both the longer transport routes and the pre-sorting required: unlike in Switzerland, waste paper and cardboard are not collected separately in the countries concerned.
In addition to the direct emissions from the manufacturing at the Perlen site, these also extend to the indirect emissions which stem from the provision of the energy that such manufacturing requires and from the various further upstream and downstream processes involved.
