Planning officers at Flintshire County Council have recommended that planning permission should be granted for Eren’s new Shotton Paper Mill.
Flintshire’s planning committee is expected to rubber stamp the permission at its next meeting on 26 October.
Based on the site of the former UPM Shotton Paper Mill in Deeside, North Wales, Turkish group Eren has taken over the site and plans up to 1 million tonnes of production capacity. Eren has also taken over land adjacent to the old mill site that will help with the expansion of the new mill.
In the planning statement, Eren outlined that it would produce containerboard (paper reels), containerboard (flat sheets), cardboard containers (boxes) and tissue products.
Some buildings from the old mill will be retained and used for different purposes such as reception and cleaning and preparation of feedstocks.
But the main production element of the mill will be in new buildings. This will include:
- A paper machine building with four floors and will house a paper machine and other plant and machinery, and offices and control rooms
- A corrugating machine building that will house the corrugating machine and will be the largest building on the site
- A new warehouse and dispatch area
- A starch process and storage building
- An effluent treatment facility
- An old corrugated cardboard recycling building.
On the expansion site, there will also be tissue machine buildings comprised of three parallel identical buildings producing jumbo rolls of tissue, a reel storage building, pulp storage building, converter building and finished goods warehouse.
These new buildings, and existing buildings, will comprise an 82 hectare site.
All 190 employees from the previous mill have been retained and around 800 jobs are expected to be created overall from the investment by Eren.
In order to meet the requirements of planning officers, a number of conditions will need to be met on the environment around the facility, details of traffic management and more.
