Environmentally conscious expansion of production - the building of a paper mill in Transdanubia was awarded a professional prize

A ceremony was held at the Vajda-Papír Group's factory in Dunaföldvár to unveil the plaque announcing the building's professional recognition in the Industrial and Energy Building category.

Vajda-Papír is a Hungarian family-owned company, with an annual production of 140 thousand tonnes of hygienic base paper, which exceeds domestic demand by far. The company, which is 25 years old this year and the market leader in Hungary, supplies its Ooops! brand and private label hygiene paper products - toilet paper, tissues, paper towels - to Scandinavia, the Baltic States and more than 30 countries in Europe. The company has three sites in Hungary and since 2013 has also operated a factory in Norway. Today, it employs around 650 people across the group. Today, it employs around 650 people at group level.

In 2021, a HUF 16 billion investment was started in Dunaföldvár to expand capacity and ensure the company's full raw material supply. The project included the construction of a base paper production hall, a base paper warehouse and pulp storage and preparation areas.

The expansion of Europe's most modern hygiene paper manufacturing plant was carried out by STRABAG Generálépítő Kft..

Attila Vajda: The award is a recognition of environmentally friendly technologies

Attila Vajda, Managing Director of Vajda-Papír, said that since 2018 the Group has been producing a significant part of the hygienic base paper needed for production at its plant in Dunaföldvár. He also recalled the phases of the expansion of the factory and that the latest investment included the construction of a new plant with a floor area of 14,212 square metres and a road of almost 10,000 square metres. The HUF 16 billion development, for which the government provided a HUF 5.5 billion subsidy, tripled the company's base paper production capacity. This has created Europe's largest tissue paper production capacity in Dunaföldvár. Attila Vajda pointed out that this is one of the greenest companies in Hungary, the first among industrial manufacturing companies to issue a green bond and to prepare an ESG report. The Managing Director said,

The Construction Excellence Award also recognises that the production of hygienic paper and the operation of the company have been achieved using the most environmentally friendly, sustainable technologies. The success was noted not only by the investor and contractor, but also by the people who work here.

The cooperation between the investor and the construction workers was exemplary

"The prize is a confirmation that the persistent engineering work and the achievements of creative people do not go unrecognised", Álmos Becsky said in his speech. The technical area manager of STRABAG recalled the day in 2021 when he was commissioned to build the plant. He emphasised that the cooperation between domestic and foreign designers, as well as between specialist contractors and customers, was exemplary throughout the project.

The factory extension was completed in fifteen months with unique solutions

Construction of the new 14,000 square metre paper machine hall and service facilities began in the summer of 2021. The contractor, STRABAG, completed the work in 15 months, which was our portal reported regularly. The construction project involved a number of unique technical and structural solutions. One of the most notable of these was the parallel installation of the technology during construction, which required careful organisation and logistical planning on the part of the STRABAG specialists. The pillars of the building housing the paper-making machine were placed on pile foundations to dampen the extreme operating temperatures and humidity, as well as the vibrations generated by the machine.

The project in figures:

• the supporting structure of the buildings is made of 15,700 t of precast reinforced concrete;
• 2,650 tonnes of reinforcing steel (without piling) and 15,600 m3 of concrete were used, totalling around 40,000 tonnes of reinforced concrete;
• at peak times, 250-270 people were working on the project, including technology;
• length of the installed cables 150.000 m;
• the heaviest precast reinforced concrete element weighs 44.37 t, and the maximum span of the main beams is 28 m;