The closure of Reno de Medici's (RDM) Villa Santa Lucia board mill in Italy has been averted. The company announced today that the plant, which has been standing still since July last year, will resume operations on 4 March.
In January, RDM had announced that it was considering to close the site permanently and had already initiated the procedure to cease production. Trade unions and politicians then mobilised to avert the closure and save jobs. RDM now reported that the procedure for the closure and the dismissal of the 163 employees had been stopped.
The reasons for the planned closure were unresolved issues and legal disputes over the past months that were blocking RDM from discharging the mill's wastewater and sludge via the existing comunal sewage treatment plant. The sludge was to be disposed of and therefore could not have been recycled and reused in cartonboard production, the company explained at the time.
At the end of January, RDM finally received an integrated environmental authorisation (Autorizzazione Integrata Ambientale - AIA) to reuse the sludge. However, there were still uncertainties regarding certain requirements. Local media reported that these were about the primary sludges being categorised as waste, preventing them from being recycled. This issue had now been resolved and the sludges were no longer defined as waste, reported the online newspaper Alessio Porcu, citing a statement from Vito Consoli, director of the Lazio region.
RDM said that ahead of the renewal of the integrated environmental authorisation, a number of matters were still to be agreed on with regard to the categorisation of some materials and the handling of some flows. These questions are now to be clarified. The group’s goal is for the practices already in place at its other mills to be applied at Villa Santa Lucia as well.
The RDM Villa Santa Lucia mill houses one board machine with a capacity of up to 220,000 tpy of white-lined chipboard (WLC), mostly GD-Liner. The mill also operates a finishing department.
