Next time you meet UPM Plywood at a fair, you will find us in the blue lounge, showcasing a gallery of beautiful sustainable plywood products.
The exhibition pays tribute to wood: the world’s only renewable building material and the main raw material in UPM’s WISA plywood. This is our way of showing our appreciation for this remarkable material.
It starts in the forest
The story of a WISA plywood panel starts in the forest. After growing there for decades, spruce and birch trees are harvested responsibly to safeguard and increase the forest's biodiversity and positive climate impact. We know where all our wood originates, and we naturally plant more trees than we harvest.
When treated with respect, the forest is an inexhaustible resource. Healthy forests are effective carbon sinks and provide a home for thousands of species, while continuously providing us with a renewable alternative to fossil raw materials.
Nothing is wasted
The finest parts of the wood become plywood and timber. Excess material is used to make pulp for paper production, and residue streams from the pulping process are refined into feedstock for biobased plastic, fertilisers, adhesives, fuels and other renewable alternatives to fossil-based products.
Carefully designed to utilise the full potential of the wood raw material, the plywood manufacturing process is all about producing more with less. The by-products of the process, such as bark and fuel chips, are used as biofuel at the mills’ bio-boilers that generate the heat required at the mill. The heat used at UPM’s plywood mills is almost exclusively produced by bioenergy.
In addition to their own energy production, the mills use purchased electricity. By 2024, all UPM Plywood mills will only purchase fossil carbon-free electricity.