After more than twenty months of work, the three employee representatives from the UPM Chapelle Darblay mill were not going to give up with the abandonment of the Belgian group VPK in the takeover of the paper mill . Arnaud Dauxerre, representative of the management college of the social and economic committee (CSE), Cyril Biffault, CGT union delegate, and Julien Sénécal, secretary of the CSE, have instead organized a meeting with the other paper industry project holders for the plant located near Rouen in Seine-Maritime.
Last Friday, four industrialists sat around a table with the services of the State, the region and the metropolis, in order to build and propose a unique takeover offer. "The goal is to fill the gaps and strengthen the assets by combining initiatives" explains Arnaud Dauxerre.
"This meeting is nothing more or less than what we have been asking the state for months, underlines the shop steward Cyril Biffault . He never wanted to hear about it. But if we need to combine different projects to build a real future for the plant, this is the time to do it." .
These individual projects involve the production of sacking, recycled market pulp for packaging, cellulosic products for biosourced insulation and newsprint.
"Paper for building insulation has the same characteristics as newsprint. But newsprint production is becoming scarce and rising prices are making many media groups unhappy. A local player would be very welcome" gives as an example the representative of the executives.
During this first meeting, a working method and a schedule were set up. "We just provided the impetus."
Two additional projects are still on the table, but they do not involve the paper process: a hydrogen project with a joint offer with the industrial and household waste collection and recycling company Paprec, and a real estate project.
"Bercy only retained two: VPK and hydrogen because the State goes for the easiest and to bring out a mutualized project requires collective intelligence" regrets the shop steward.
And the announcement of VPK's withdrawal has had an unexpected effect: its strong investment in a French paper site seems to have highlighted the sector's strengths: new factory visits have been organized with industrialists who had previously remained silent.
From now on, things should change quickly: UPM has announced that it will give its answer on the takeover of the site by June 30, when the maintenance of the industrial tool will come to an end, and with it, the irreversible decline of the paper mill created almost a century ago.
