UPM rebranded as The Biofore Company five years ago and has since focused on developing new products based on a commitment to creating value from renewable and recyclable materials.

The culmination to date is a project to show how three of these materials could be used in conjunction – The Biofore Concept Car, a vehicle based on and powered by wood fibre-derived products.

The first of the new products was UPM Grada formable plywood. This enables a huge range of shapes to be achieved by heating, forming and cooling the plywood, a process that can be fully automated for large-scale manufacture. The resulting components are stronger and more stable than traditional form-pressed components, with the added benefit that the adhesive is free from formaldehyde and other harmful compounds.

The second product, UPM Formi, also launched in 2011, is a cellulose fibre reinforced plastic composite with high renewable material content. Chemical pulp from UPM’s mills provide virtually pure cellulose fibres. These are combined with polypropylene to produce a material with superior stiffness and strength to pure polypropylene and 50% renewable content.

Designed for injection moulding, it has already been tried in a range of end products. The latest development, UPM BioVerno fuel, comes fully on stream later this summer and will be manufactured in UPM’s €150m biorefinery in Lappeenranta at a rate of 120 million litres a year. This quality clean diesel is derived from ‘tall oil’, a residue from pulp mills. In tests it has reduced emissions by up to 80% compared to its conventional fossil counterpart. It meets current diesel standards and is suited to all diesel engines and vehicles.

This new product trio was showcased together in the Biofore Concept Car at the Geneva International Motorshow earlier this year. The vehicle features a range of parts traditionally manufactured from plastic in bio-composites. UPM Grada is used in the passenger compartment floor, centre console, display panel and door panels and UPM Formi in the dashboard, side skirts, front mask, door panels and interior panels. And the car is powered, of course, by BioVerno.

Designed and manufactured by students at the Helsinki Metropolitan University of Applied Sciences, the car’s use of bio-composites underlines the exciting potential for use of biomaterials in the automotive industry, as well as UPM’s commitment to the broader biofore business.

UPM by numbers

  • Sawmill capacity: Alholma 250,000m³; Kaukas 530,000m³; Korkeakoski 330,000m³; Seikku 380,000m³
  • Sales (all figures 2013): €10.1bn
  • Employees: 21,000
  • Production countries: 14
  • Exports: 1.04 million m³ per year
  • Timber sourced: 28 million m³ worldwide
  • Timber and biomass sourced from 17 Countries
  • Fuels from renewable sources: 67%
  • Global product and raw material deliveries: 21,000 loads per week
  • Finnish timber purchases: €870m per year
  • Investment in Finland 2013: €242m (including kilns at Kaukas, new bio heating plant at Korkeakoski, de-bottlenecking at all mills. And this summer Alholma gets a new sticking machine)
  • Finnish R&D personnel: 200
  • Share of Finland’s total sea freight exports: 12%
  • Environmental investment: €29m
  • Production residue reuse: 90%