RIYADH, 26 January — A Saudi conglomerate has announced that it is setting up a project worth over $100 million (SR375 million) for producing one-sided coated duplex boards from recycled waste paper collected from the Kingdom's 22 million population.
According to Fahd Al-Obeikan, chairman of Riyadh-based Obeikan Industrial Investment Group, they will invest in a new greenfield mill that will use the treated city effluents available in abundant quantity and good quality.
The project, to be jointly financed by Obeikan and the Saudi Industrial Development Fund , will have a total production capacity of 100,000 tons per year which could be expanded to 160,000 tons in the future.
An independent study estimates that only five percent of the total paper waste is recycled in the Kingdom as against 70 percent in the Scandinavian countries. Paper waste per head in the Kingdom is about 2.5 kg, much higher than that of the United States. About SR100 million worth of paper is wasted on a daily basis in this country, according to Prince Abdullah ibn Musaed, chairman of the board of Saudi Paper Manufacturing Co.
Referring to the duplex board project, Al Obeikan said the products will be marketed within the GCC, Middle East and North Africa countries, where the group has already set up representative offices.
He said the pulp and paper engineering and consulting firm, Tessag KSH of Montreal, Canada, has been selected to establish the design criteria, the mill concept, product specification and state-of-the-art technology appropriate for the project.
"Obeikan has received many offers from the equipment and machinery suppliers and the orders confirmation by the end of June this year. European, Korean and Japanese board machine builders are already in the race for this important contract. The new mill is expected to start production within the second half of 2003.
Obeikan Industrial Investment Group is a major printing, packaging and publishing group in the Kingdom. It operates five industrial divisions and two trading divisions. Its activities include: flexible packaging, folding boxboard packaging, liquid packaging (involving two joint ventures), commercial printing, technical textiles and coated fabrics as well as Obeikan Bookshops (for bookselling, editing and publishing house. The group has more than 1,000 employees with representative offices in major GCC and Middle East countries.
The group belongs to the Al-Obeikan family with Fahad Al-Obeikan as chairman, Abdullah Al-Obeikan, managing director, and Omran Al-Obeikan general manager for sales and marketing.
Al-Obeikan converts per year more than 50,000 tons of paper and boards in five industrial plants in addition to 20,000 tons of various plastic products (OPP, PET, PVC, PE and PTFE) needed for its operations.