Bell Bay Pulp Mill

The Bell Bay Pulp Mill, also known as the Tamar Valley Pulp Mill or Gunns Pulp Mill, is a proposed $2.3 billionpulp mill which Gunns Limited was planning to build in the Tamar Valley, near Launceston, Tasmania.

The proposed mill is to use the Kraft process, with Elemental Chlorine Free bleaching, and it is claimed it is to be fed with 100 per cent plantation grown eucalyptus feed stock, having a production capacity of 1.1 million tonnes per annum of Air Dried pulp. Construction of the mill is supported by the State Government and the Federal Government and opposed by a number of environmentally focused and other local community groups.

It is not the first pulp mill proposed for Tasmania. In 1989 Wesley Vale pulp mill was proposed but did not go ahead. The Wesley Vale project was to be a kraft mill and was also subject local opposition due to its use of elemental chlorine as the main bleaching chemical, which was a convention of that time. As a result of the failure of the Wesley Vale project, a major series of scientific studies termed the National Pulp Mills Research Program was commissioned by the Commonwealth Government to support an update and strengthening of the Australian guidelines for this industry sector. At about the same time, significant changes in bleaching technology and waste water treatment in relation to kraft pulp mills were also being made throughout the world.

On completion of the scientific studies, the Tasmanian guidelines for any new Tasmanian mill were then developed and published in 2004, which included provisions that meant that any future project must implement either Elemental Chlorine Free or Totally Chlorine Free bleaching technology.

Tasmania was an innovator in pulp and paper in the 1930s and 40s, with one pulp mill established in the Derwent Valley and one at Burnie. The Burnie pulp mill no longer exists and the mill in the Derwent Valley (Boyer) is vastly different from that proposed for the Tamar Valley, being a smaller scale (295,000 tpa), a thermo-mechanical process and includes paper making machines (producing news print on site), in comparison to the more sophisticated kraft process producing higher value pulp for further processing into copying paper, tissues etc. by off-site customers.

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