Nelson Pine Industries celebrates 40th anniversary

Friday 4 Oct 2024

 
One of Nelson Tasman’s largest employers, Nelson Pine Industries is celebrating its 40th anniversary this week. The company, which employs 275 full-time staff and contributes significantly to the region’s economy, was founded in October 1984. Its products Golden Edge MDF® and Nelson Pine LVL® are widely used in furniture, kitchens, residential and commercial buildings throughout the Asia-Pacific markets but also in the Nelson region. The company supplied LVL (laminated veneer lumber) product to the new Nelson Airport, which has won a number of architectural awards.

Nelson Pine Industries (NPI) is also proud of its support of other major building products in the region, including the NMIT Arts and Media building, Suter Art Gallery, Nelson Tasman Hospice and Nelson School Music.

In the 1960s a chipmill operated at Lower Queen St, Richmond until 1984 when Newmans Group, Odlins Ltd and Sumitomo Forestry Ltd (SFC) decided to establish a MDF factory to add more value to a wood chip commodity. Later, in 1993 Sumitomo Forestry became the sole shareholder of Nelson Pine Industries.

At that time, the MDF production using continuous presses was the most advanced technology available worldwide. Nelson Pine Industries has since expanded to run three lines of MDF production and one production line for LVL and has now become the biggest wood processor in New Zealand’s South Island.

Nelson Pine Industries processes one million m3 of logs each year, which represents around a quarter of the entire regional harvest.

Leveraging top-tier technology, some of Nelson Pine Industries’s most recent large-scale projects includes the use of 1,000m3 of Nelson Pine LVL® as the sole material for the main structure of New Zealand’s largest timber office building in Devonport Rd, Tauranga (8-storey). Among others, Nelson Pine LVL® was also used for the building structure of the multi-tenanted retail precinct Nelson Junction.

Nelson Pine Industries is at the forefront of sustainability with their products sequestering carbon for many decades, helping New Zealand (and other economies) to achieve its target to become a carbon-neutral economy by 2035. Once trees are grown, processed into MDF and LVL products and used in furniture and buildings, carbon is sequestered for decades until at the end-of their life-cycle. They can then be repurposed or used as fuel in biomass power plants, and growing trees again creating a closed-loop system.

Executive director and chief executive officer Kai Kruse says: “I want to express my appreciation and thanks to our shareholders and all our staff, customers, suppliers, and community for the past 40 years and look forward to celebrating many more milestones. Going forward we will continue to grow our LVL Mass Timber business, especially for non-residential buildings, and we will diversify our MDF products further.”

Chairperson Murray Sturgeon says that “the company succeeded in producing the high-quality products that have led to the present day and are now highly regarded both in New Zealand and around the world. The company has achieved significant growth over the past 40 years thanks to all our customers, our strong partnership with Sumitomo Forestry and the support of its dedicated employees.”

Source & image credit: Nelson Pine Industries


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