Quality from Hessian forests

Hartmut Dietermann has experienced many turbulent times in the timber trade. “But it has never been like this before,” marvels the Managing Director of Furnier- und Holzwerk Mittenaar GmbH in the Hessian district of Lahn-Dill. The huge peeling machine never stops turning in the background as he talks about the unrelenting demand for beech peeled veneers and firewood. Layer by layer, it cuts almost endless veneer sheets out of the beech trunks. Just a few steps away, the veneer sheets go through an elongated drying line, where they are dried and flattened like in an oversized iron. The employees routinely remove undesirable irregularities in the wood – a kind of continuous quality control before the dried veneers are optimally cut to customer requirements at the end of the 70-metre-long production hall.

There is great demand for peeled veneers – with a manageable number of competitors. This creates a special market structure: “We all have our own areas of specialisation, serving our own niche markets,” Dietermann describes the industry. The niche of the Middle Hesse company is industry, and transformer construction in particular. Veneers are used as an insulation material in this field. “Copper beech wood is non-conductive and has the best electrical properties for use in transformers,” explains Dietermann on the benefits of his veneers. And transformers are needed “also for the development of renewable energies.” The company supplies a small part of its production to the furniture industry. Firewood is made out of the leftover wood from veneer production – demand for it has risen dramatically as well.

Something else the experienced wood specialist has never experienced like this before in his long career at the veneer plant: “Since the acquisition, the Weimer Group has invested heavily in the restructuring of the company.” Some of the systems built on the veneer plant’s premises over fifty years ago are now more of a hindrance to efficient production processes. There is not enough space to expand either. With a comprehensive action plan, the veneer production in Mittenaar is now to be redesigned to become more modern, sustainable and energy-optimised. The administration rooms have already been renovated, old buildings had to be removed to create a new wet wood yard and to renew the steam pits.

The plant is fired with waste wood and leftover wood from the production. When processing around 18,000 solid cubic metres of peeled wood and 10,000 solid cubic metres of firewood every year, sufficient biofuel is naturally produced. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, are not used for heat generation in the company. In the face of global fossil energy crises, the Hessian company is truly ahead of the times. From raw materials for production to biofuel for the heat supply, the company operates strictly regionally, and almost entirely utilises the raw material wood.

Due to the high energy efficiency and the use of well over 50 per cent of the heat generated for the production process, the mid-sized company was able to take advantage of federal funding for energy efficiency in commerce, a low-interest, large-volume promotional programme with high repayment bonuses from funds from the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. “Of course, the maximum repayment bonus of 55 per cent for our biomass plant was a decisive factor in being able to tackle an investment on this scale,” says Hartmut Dietermann.

However, his focus is already on further modernisation plans for the future. But the construction cranes that are currently on the company premises are not part of these plans. They belong to the central fire station that the local authority is planning to build on the company premises. Also a sign of how firmly anchored the established enterprise is in Mittenaar – as firmly rooted as the beech trees in the Hessian forests while embracing the energy-efficient production of tomorrow at the same time.