There had been a terrible rumour in the paper industry watchers circle that Arjo’s Chartham Paper Mill in Kent was under threat of closure. You can therefore imagine the relief and delight when Arjo announced recently that it was to become the ‘tracing paper’ centre of their empire, though at the expense of one of the two paper machines at their French site at Annonay. This will affect 61 employees in France, but the mill still has another machine (PM7) which will continue to manufacture around 14,000 tonnes of speciality uncoated woodfree paper per annum (for now).
Tracing paper might be seen as a diminishing market, with consumption estimated at around 30,000 tonnes globally, a 50% chunk of which Arjo are said to supply. But tracing paper has come a long way from it’s days of drawing on one side in pencil, turning the sheet over and re-drawing (or even scribbling) over the image created on the face of the sheet, and then turning it over once more to carefully go over the image again in order to transfer that image to a separate substrate. Even the days of creating an original architectural drawing on a sheet of tracing paper and then using a dyeline machine to reproduce that drawing on to ‘regular’ paper are diminishing with the advent of wide format photocopiers, or even C.A.D. where the image is created electronically ‘on screen’ and fed to a wide format inkjet printer of even a basic plotter to create hard-copy images. These days, tracing paper comes in colours, good strong, bold colours, even black and metallics, and you can print on it, cut and crease it, even laser cut it and emboss it.
Tracing paper was also used as part of the form-set for credit card transaction documentation, (remember those awful Visa, Access and Amex machines that you had to put your card into to have it run-over to impart the raised information from your credit card on to every sheet in the set, and then you had to sign the top copy, hopefully without your ballpoint pen going through the tracing paper that, gee folks, you got to fold-up and keep as your copy of the transaction?) but that use has decreased dramatically with the advent of chip and pin, and this too has had an adverse effect on the ‘carbonless’ papers market.
Hence we see the future closure of Arjo’s Dartford Mill, the greater part of whose output was ‘NCR’ paper, though in truth they made lots of other lovely papers too, but these are of little consequence it seems, and doubtless of insufficient output to sustain the Mill as an entity, so look out Annonay, you may still be producing 14,000 tonnes of paper on your one remaining machine, but it has got to be something really special to justify the mill’s continued existence. Watch this space……
