Jun 2 2006
Boral Timber has announced that the new $24 million Timber Processing Plant at the Herons Creek site has been completed. Construction of the new plant commenced in December 2004 and was constructed next to the existing Sawmill, which continued to operate at full capacity throughout the project. The new mill was integrated with the existing mill at Easter and will ramp up to a two shift operation during July.
The new plant, with improved safety features, is designed to operate more efficiently with the regrowth log resource available from State Forests. The investment in safer and more efficient technology at Herons Creek together with the depressed state of the New South Wales housing market, has resulted in a decision to close the Kempsey and Bostobrick green mills which use older technology and are less capable of efficiently processing regrowth logs.
The Kempsey and Bostobrick operations employ a total of 47 staff and are located in northern New South Wales. The Kempsey plant is expected to close in the middle of June while the Bostobrick operation is scheduled to close by the end of July.
It is expected there will be a number of redundancies although the company is optimistic that a number of staff will take up positions at other Boral Timber operations. Executive General Manager of Boral Timber, Mr Peter Boyd, said that while all positions will be made redundant at the two plants, he hopes that a number of the experienced timber workers can be redeployed to other operations within Boral Timber.
"The new Timber Processing Plant at Herons Creek currently has 25 positions available. Over the coming weeks we will discuss the specific roles that we are seeking to fill at Herons Creek with our employees at Kempsey and Bostobrick. We are hopeful that redeployment will be an option for some of our affected employees," said Mr Boyd.
Production from Kempsey and Bostobrick is sold either direct to the market or further processed at one of Boral's dry plant operations into value-added products. Ongoing supply to customers will continue from the Herons Creek Sawmill as well as other mills in the Boral group with no disruption of service or supply to customers anticipated.
http://www.boral.com.au/