Metsä Tissue has said the European energy crisis has forced it to make additional curtailments in tissue production.
Earlier this year the business announced temporary production stops at its Kreuzau mill in Germany and its Zilina mill in Slovakia due to “extremely high energy prices” driven by the energy crisis in Europe, where it had to curtail production for several days.
As of September, the company said the situation has been “continuously worsening and is impacting all of Metsä Tissue’s markets in Europe and is especially demanding on the company’s Western and Eastern European mills”.
It added that with the high energy cost inflation, “further production curtailments are likely, and may also impact the availability of daily tissue products in the markets as substantial amounts of daily production losses will occur”.
Tobias Lüning, SVP Central Europe, Metsä Tissue, said: “To mitigate the situation we have explored all possible energy efficiency improvement actions, and mitigation actions to replace gas with alternative energy sources are on-going.
“We have also been forced to revise our offering and the crisis will also speed up the move towards fresh fibre focused strategy, which enables lower energy use in the paper making, compared to recycled fibres.”
The business added that tissue profitability “will continue to be reviewed on a daily basis, and the high energy costs will most likely continue to cause additional temporary production shutdowns”.
