The Hindu Business Line : TNPL sets up tissue culture facility

Chennai, Feb. 22 Tamil Nadu Newsprint and Papers Ltd (TNPL) has set up one of the largest tissue culture facilities in the country, for producing pulpwood saplings for its farm forestry and captive plantation programme, to strengthen raw material availability.

This is a key facility that will back the company’s programme to augment captive pulpwood capacity, which would insulate it from the price fluctuations of imported raw material pulp and strengthen TNPL’s competitiveness in the long term.

Raw material supply

For instance, in the last one year the price of hardwood pulp has increased from about $510 a tonne to more than $710. This bites into the margin for paper mills, which are looking at ways to augment raw material supply and conserve costs.

The tissue culture facility has a capacity produce of about a million clones of pulpwood saplings of eucalyptus, casuarina and bamboo. Together with the with the greenhouse facility — a macro propagation facility to multiply the number of the seedlings — it can produce about 15 million saplings of pulpwood trees every year for cultivation in the fields.

TNPL’s Chairman and the Tamil Nadu Industries Secretary, Mr M.F. Farooqui, said that the project while ensuring the company’s competitiveness also fulfils an important social role — augmenting rural income and bringing under cultivation and productivity large tracts of dry land. The saplings are sold to the farmers at a subsidised rate and the wood is bought back by the company at assured prices.

Plantation acreage

According to Mr A. Velliangiri, Deputy Managing Director, TNPL, the company hopes to bring under pulpwood cultivation over one lakh acres through contract farming — farm forestry programme — and captive plantations. It will add over 15,000 acres a year under contract farming over the next five years, adding to the 28,000 acres now under cultivation.

TNPL would produce high-yielding varieties of pulpwood plants that would be distributed to the farmers.

The company would buyback the wood for an assured price — either the agreed price or prevailing market rates, whichever is higher. Planting material is sold at about Rs 3 a sapling and the company will pay about Rs 1,800 a tonne for eucalyptus wood and about Rs 2,000 for casuarina. Eucalyptus can yield about 60 tonnes an acre in five years.

For TNPL the primary raw material is bagasse, the fibre left over from sugarcane used by sugar mills. It uses bagasse pulp blended with wood pulp to produce paper. TNPL needs about 8-10 lakh tonnes of bagasse a year and about 1.5 lakh tonnes of wood, which will increase to about 4.5 lakh tonnes from the next year, when its expansion programme is in place. Under its farm forestry programme the company hopes to get about 3-4 lakh tonnes of wood a year from 2012 onwards.

More Stories on : Outlook | Paper | rd & Newsprint

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page