Massimo Medugno, Director General of Assocarta, spoke today at the second edition of the Legambiente Forum “Italy Under Construction: The New Green Jobs of the Made in Italy Ecological Transition”. “The participation of the paper industry in Legambiente’s Construction Sites for Sustainability initiative aims to concretely demonstrate the ecological transition underway in Italian paper districts, which constitute a key sector of the circular bioeconomy that has invested in recycling and raw material sustainability,” says Medugno, “with the use of 63% of recycled paper in production, which is combined with the remaining percentage coming from cellulose – renewable and certified – which guarantees sourcing from sustainably managed forests. In packaging, recycling is consistently over 85%, exceeding the 75% target by 2025 set by EU legislation.”
But at the center of the message launched in Rome by Assocarta is:
- the alarm over the weight of energy costs in paper mills and throughout energy-intensive manufacturing, which puts 700,000 workers and an export of 60% of essential products at risk for the vast majority of downstream supply chains.
- the request to Parliament to introduce mechanisms for allocating energy from renewable sources decoupled from the price of energy.
“The price of energy in Italy,” Medugno emphasizes, “is 38% higher than in Germany, 72% higher than in Spain, and 87% higher than in France. It is a multiple of that in America and China. And this is due to a mechanism that also prices energy from renewables at the price of that produced with gas – which from October to today – has increased by more than 30% based on trading on the Amsterdam market, despite the fact that imports are essentially from the South.”
The challenge of decarbonization is at the center of investments by paper mills, which today are mainly powered by natural gas with which electricity and heat are obtained through self-production in cogeneration, but the sector is working on other energy solutions such as biomethane, bioliquids, biomass, production residues and hydrogen.
“A particular role in the tour of the construction sites last year was played by the highly energy-intensive sectors/production sites such as the glass, paper or steel industry. Sectors strongly committed to decarbonization pathways, but at the same time under constant pressure due to fluctuations in the cost of gas,” states the Report presented today by Legambiente.
The need to increase the competitiveness of Italian industry, reduce energy costs and support the decarbonization process of hard-to-abate sectors are objectives that can be achieved by adopting a diversified strategy that, in addition to energy efficiency, includes the circular economy, the use of low-carbon fuels, the electrification of consumption and the use of innovative energy vectors. It is with this objective that Assocarta has signed an agreement with the GSE and with the CIB Italian Biogas Consortium for agricultural biomethane.
