Clairefontaine, + then 165 years of papers
Paper production has a long tradition in the Meurthe valley, dating back to the creation of the first paper mills in the 16th century. It was in this propitious environment that Papeteries de Clairefontaine began production in 1858, in the commune of Etival Clairefontaine, located on the banks of the Meurthe 90 km from Strasbourg. Taking advantage of the rags supplied by the local textile industry, within a few years Clairefontaine had become one of the most important factories in the region. To complete its product range, the company began manufacturing envelopes in 1880, followed by notebooks.
Clairefontaine today
Three activities: paper, envelopes and notebooks are still present on the site. The plant has two 3.40 m wide paper machines. For one of them, production speed reaches 1000m per minute, which represents 60km and 15 tons of paper produced per hour.
Pastes and forest
Papeteries de Clairefontaine do not produce their own pulp, but source it from world markets. This enables them to diversify their sources of supply to meet the high quality composition of their papers, with, for example, long fibers from Scandinavia for their strength, or short fibers from the eucalyptus forests of Brazil for their opacity and coating properties. What's more, their Everbal subsidiary produces only recyclable paper, without dyeing or bleaching, with an exceptional yield of 106kg of used paper for every 100kg of paper produced.
165,000 tons
of paper per year
Thanks to these constantly modernized machines, Clairefontaine supplies its customers with 165,000 tonnes of uncoated, cellulose-free paper a year... for office applications, offset printing and the manufacture of paper objects.
The papers of emotions since 1858