It’s just gone 7:45am on a ridiculously cold Tuesday morning in Melbourne.
I’m standing with a small cluster of workmates in the cark park of the Australian Paper offices in Mt Waverley.

What am I doing? Why did I agree to this?

We’re about to set off on a two-hour trek out to Maryvale. My throat is burning, my eyes are red slits and my nose will not stop running… Why hasn’t that damn Codral kicked in yet?!

Luckily Sam, BDM extraordinaire and Australian Paper chaperone for the day, is on the ball. She takes one look at the miserable bunch standing in front of her and loudly declares, “Who wants coffee?“ “Meeeeee!” I half croak / squeak like some deranged caffeine addict on a detox.

Fast forward two hours and ten minutes (side note: Sam demonstrates her initiative once more by providing fresh donuts and water for the ride – bless her) and we arrive at what can only be described as the gigantic clearing in the timber plantation that is the Maryvale Paper Mill.

The Mill covers 44 hectares (that’s big) and employs just under 1,000 people, almost all of them local residents. The site houses three pulp mills, five paper machines (and by machines, I mean huge paper-making contraptions that are up to 200 metres in length and as tall as a four storey building) and a waste paper processing plant. It operates 24 hours a day, 363 days a year. Although Rob the Mill’s Product Tech Manager, is keen to make it 365…

580,000 tonnes of paper are produced here each year using pulp processed from both pine and eucalypt chips. And with that much paper, comes a lot of water: 600 million litres per day to be precise. Now that may seem like a lot (it is) but it’s not as much as it could be – the Mill actually recycles this water four times over throughout the entire paper-making cycle. So, in fact, the savings in water consumption onsite are huge.

Australian Paper has also implemented a carbon-offset initiative across the board; a cradle to grave life cycle analysis that’s independently certified under the Australian Government’s National Carbon Offset Standard (NCOS).

The tour concluded around 2:30pm and yet we’d only managed to glimpse a fraction of what the Mill is capable of. Roland, our highly knowledgeable and paper-encyclopaedia-on-legs tour guide, extended an invitation to return in the near future to explore the unseen areas and operations of the Mill. We all enthusiastically accepted, bobbing our heads in unison, hands outstretched in thanks, But maybe in the summer, we mused…

www.australianpaper.com.au