The Value of Sustainability

What Mercer’s 2025 Sustainability Days Mean for Our Day-to-Day Work

At Mercer, sustainability is neither an abstract concept nor a topic reserved for management or reports. It directly shapes our daily work – how we produce, invest, and future-proof our sites. This was precisely the focus of the second annual 2025 Mercer Sustainability Days.

Under the guiding theme, “The Value of Sustainability,” one key question took center stage: How do our projects at the mills help secure jobs, remain competitive, and use resources responsibly?

Sustainability is not an add-on, but an integral part of how Mercer operates as a company – at every site.

Climate Protection as a Strategic Competitive Advantage

One of the key takeaways from the German Sustainability Days was unmistakable: tackling climate change is no longer optional, but a strategic necessity to safeguard our competitiveness with European and global customers. Customers expect quantifiable improvements in the emissions intensity of our products to meet their own ambitious sustainability targets. 

Our Pre-evaporator project at Mercer Rosenthal is a prime example of how we meet these expectations. An evaporator is a large process equipment that boils off water from a liquid so what’s left becomes more concentrated.

At a pulp mill, evaporators are used to remove water from the “black liquor” that comes out of the pulping process. That concentrated liquor is then sent to the recovery system, where it helps the mill recover chemicals and generate energy.

A pre-evaporator is simply an extra “first step” evaporator added ahead of the main evaporators. It uses recovered, low-value heat to remove some water early, which reduces the mill’s need for fresh steam and water and can free up steam to make more electricity. Specifically, we reduce raw water intake by 22 cubic meters per hour – more than 500 cubic meters per day – while also saving chemicals.

Through the consistent recovery of steam and water, we are significantly reducing our resource consumption while increasing our internal power generation by 0.97 MW – equivalent to the average annual electricity demand of around 2,000 households.

A process improvement thus becomes a profit center. This is exactly what we mean when we say: sustainability is good business. Every cubic meter of water saved and every kilowatt generated internally strengthens our operational and financial resilience.

The conversion of the lime kiln to biomass at the Mercer Stendal mill is a strategic investment with the clear goal of significantly reducing our Scope 1 greenhouse gas emissions. A lime kiln in a pulp mill is necessary for the process of recovering cooking chemicals so that they can be reused in production. The conversion to biomass means that fossil fuels (natural gas) are replaced by bio-based, renewable fuels to generate the heat for the lime burning process. This reduces fossil CO₂ emissions, decreases dependence on fossil fuels, and utilizes local by-products that would otherwise remain unused.

Mercer is firmly committed to this project, as it is central to our position as a preferred supplier. Leading European customers no longer view reducing emissions along the supply chain as a desire, but as a prerequisite for a long-term partnership. The example of Mercer Stendal clearly shows that with a bold climate investment, we are directly contributing to our sustainable business success and our future viability.

Efficiency in Action: How Our Mills Save Resources and Become More Profitable

The results from our North American mills vividly show that sustainability and economic performance go hand in hand.

At the Mercer Celgar mill, fiber losses have been reduced by 57% since 2022. More than half of the fibers that used to be lost now remain in the production cycle. Previously, losses in the Reverse Centrifugal Cleaners (RCC) area of the pulp machine room amounted to approximately 4.2 air-dry metric tons (ADMT) per day. At the same time, lime waste sent to landfills has been reduced by one third, resulting in tangible savings in disposal and operating costs.

At the Mercer Peace River mill, the 4DX program (Four Disciplines of Execution). It’s a practical method MPR is using to make sure important goals do not get lost in day-to-day work: MPR will pick a small number of top priorities, measure the actions that drive results, and use a simple scoreboard so everyone can see progress.

4DX demonstrates how safety, planning, and efficiency reinforce each other. Increased planned maintenance shutdowns significantly reduced unplanned outages. Equipment now runs more reliably, consumes less natural gas, and incurs lower costs. These results are not abstract metrics – they directly strengthen the operational resilience of our mills.

Another forward-looking project at Mercer Peace River investigates the pelletization of landfill waste to be used in agricultural beneficial re-use applications which can improve soil health by raising pH levels. The collaboration with a liming plant has the potential  capacity to use up to 50,000 tons of landfilled materials annually..  This corresponds to the weight of around 25,000 mid-range cars that would no longer end up in landfills.

The Power of Wood: Mass Timber and the Future of Carbon Storage

The Mass Timber Sustainability Day highlighted the unique role of engineered wood products such as cross-laminated timber (CLT) and glue-laminated timber (GL). Wood products can store biogenic carbon for decades while in service, and can support lower-carbon construction when used in place of more emissions-intensive materials.

We have already realized this potential in large-scale projects. A well-known example is Google’s YouTube headquarters, a building constructed using Mercer’s mass timber. Projects like this demonstrate that sustainable construction and economic success go hand in hand.

Mass timber is a key growth area for Mercer. Our strong market position is demonstrated by our collaboration with Google: together, we completed the Google 1265 Borregas project last year. The five-story office building covers 182,500 square meters and sets new standards for sustainable design with its solid wood construction.

Every additional wooden building means less CO₂ in the atmosphere and more carbon stored in durable products. By 2030, our goal is to increase the long-term carbon storage from mass timber by 200% from 2024 by increasing our production.  

Responsible forestry is the basis of our actions. Mercer will support five Principles for Responsible Timber Construction developed by the Built by Nature organization. These principles focus on extending building life, whole-life-cycle impacts, sustainable forest management, maximizing carbon storage, and supporting a timber building bioeconomy.

Decarbonization and Efficiency as Keys to Competitiveness

The Sustainability Days at Mercer Holz, Mercer Timber Products, and Mercer Torgau clearly showed where the greatest levers lie for our German sites: consistent decarbonization and increased operational efficiency. Both are essential to securing our competitiveness in our global markets.

At Mercer Holz , the focus was particularly on logistics, as transportation is one of the largest drivers of fossil energy consumption. A key success is the LoOP (logistic optimization) project for digital truck processing. At the Rosenthal, Friesau, Torgau, and Stendal sites, up to 700 trucks are processed digitally every day. Freight forwarders can now use our logistics portal to independently register their trucks and drivers and plan time slots flexibly. The app lets drivers book time slots and electronically transmit relevant information, including delivery bills.

The result: a paperless process, shorter waiting times, and more efficient operations that save more than €400,000 annually and avoid 183 tonnes of CO₂ by reducing truck idling.

Complementing this, the E-truck project was presented, with two fully electric trucks now in operation. They demonstrate significant potential: energy consumption is approximately two and a half times lower compared to conventional diesel trucks. This is supported by the terminal strategy, which shifts long-distance timber transport to rail. From a distance of around 70 kilometers, rail transport is significantly more CO₂-efficient than road transport.

At Mercer Timber Products, the focus was on optimizing load monitoring for railcars. By reducing underloading, €202,000 in costs had already been saved by August 2025. At the same time, improved utilization results in annual CO₂ savings of around 60 tonnes – a clear example of how operational precision delivers direct economic and environmental benefits.

Mercer Torgau makes a central contribution to group-wide decarbonization. The site supplies the Stendal pulp mill with residual wood chips and is planned to provide pellets in the future to support the decarbonization of the lime kiln at Stendal by replacing natural gas. With an annual pellet production capacity of around 140,000 tonnes, up to approximately 80,000 tonnes of Torgau’s pellets could be used for this purpose. At the same time, Mercer Torgau will continue to produce and market pellets for external customers.

In parallel, Mercer Torgau is strategically shifting its production toward higher-value structural timber. The goal is to reduce dependence on the currently weak demand for industrial pallets and to increase the overall resilience of the business model.

Outlook

This year’s Sustainability Days once again demonstrated that sustainability at Mercer is not a separate topic, but an integral part of our business – driving efficiency, innovation, and competitiveness. From the strategic necessity of climate protection to concrete efficiency projects and the future of the bioeconomy, our commitment creates value at every level.

Each of these projects began with an idea – the value of sustainability is evident in the details. That’s why we will be highlighting each of our key projects individually over the coming months. We will provide you with exclusive background information and show you how we are making our locations future-proof, step by step.

Don’t miss a single post in our new series – coming soon to our blog!