Egger group has acquired a 60 per cent stake in the Italian wood recycling company Cartfer Urbania S.r.l. The purchase agreement was concluded on 27 March 2024, the Austrian wood-based materials manufacturer announced last week. Cartfer is based in Urbania in the Marche region, "at the heart of the Italian furniture industry", Egger reported.
The company said that the transaction provides the foundation for its first waste wood collection site in Italy. It is expected to help expand Egger's processing capacity for waste wood and enable it to raise the share of recycled wood in chipboard production. The parties have agreed not to disclose the purchase price or other details of the transaction, according to Egger.
For the past five years, Cartfer Urbania has supplied waste wood to the Italian chipboard panel producers SAIB in Caorso near Piacenza, which has been majority-owned by the Egger group since December 2022. This cooperation is now expected to be intensified. "Our chipboard plant in Caorso uses 100 per cent recycled wood. We can now make the valuable resource that is recycled wood even more readily available for our production in that location," commented Giuseppe Conti, plant manager finance/administration at SAIB's Caorso site.
Cartfer's previous owner Sara Burani will remain part of the company management, and the team of eight employees has been transferred to the new majority owner. Ms Burani described the transaction as a "great growth opportunity for all of us", which would allow Cartfer to grow faster and to be able to face the upcoming challenges with more security.
Egger says it has been using recycled wood to manufacture new high-quality chipboard for almost 30 years. The wood originates from old furniture, packaging material or production residues and waste. To secure the supply of post-consumer recycled wood to its plants, Egger operates its own recycling collection sites under the name "Egger Timberpak" in France, Germany, Poland, Romania, the USA and the UK and now in Italy.
Network in Poland expands
At the beginning of April 2024, Egger put a new Timberpak site into operation in Gdańsk, Poland. The facility has a processing capacity of up to 60,000 tonnes a year and is the company's second recycling site in the country. The first was opened about 18 months ago in Warsaw.
Overall, the Egger group operates 22 production sites worldwide with around 11,000 employees and generated turnover of €4.45bn in its 2022/2023 financial year. The company aims to raise the proportion of its wood consumption consisting of either recycled pre-consumer or post-consumer waste to an average of at least 25 per cent by 2025. In the past business year, the share stood at 23 per cent, according to the group's most recent sustainability report.
