Fertilizers from forest industry’s side flows

Metsäbiotalouden tulevaisuuskuvasto / Forest Bioeconomy Future Catalogue

The BioA project of Cursor, the development company of Kotka-Hamina region in southern Finland, produces fertilizers in Kotka, southern Finland. An investment of EUR 30 million will produce initially 40,000 tons fertilizers annually, but the plan is to tenfold the production in 2020. Fertilizers are made from byproducts of paper mills and purified ash from power plants.

In the beginning the number of raw material suppliers is small, but in the future the raw material is to be supplied by Stora Enso’s Sunila pulp mill.

Using side streams of paper and pulp mills reduces use of energy and results in smaller phosphorus emissions in waterways. BioA, which now is an individual company, has a total of four patents for the fertilizers.

The fertilizer has been tested by Natural Resources Institute Finland, and so far the results have been good. The main substance of the fertilizer is the digestate made by gazing the raw materials. The digestate is then dried by waste heat from industries, for example.

After that, the fertilizer is mixed with nitrogen and pelletized, after which it is easy to transport, process and distribute. Also ashes are added, in order to reduce acidity and increase amount of phosphorus and potassium of the soil.

Originally the project started in the beginning of 2010. Along the project also algae was planned to be used in biogas production.

”We have bumped into many walls and always found a new path forward. Ten percent of our work has been ingenuity and the rest just hard work,” said Jari Järvinen, CEO of BioA in an article of Finnish Broadcasting Corporation.

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