European pulp mill capacity by country

What the review found

In August 2026 we took all 264 published pulp mill capacities in the register through a source-by-source review. Among the figures that could be verified against a primary source, 38 percent were wrong: 43 measured the wrong quantity and 30 carried the wrong number. The single most common defect was a paper or board figure standing in a pulp field. An integrated mill that publishes only its paper capacity has not published its pulp capacity, and writing the paper number into the pulp field overstates what is known.

The review produced 61 corrections. 39 of them were removals: the field was emptied because the only published figure measured the wrong quantity. 22 were replacements with a sourced figure. Coverage fell from 264 mills with a figure to 225, deliberately. A smaller number of verified figures describes the industry better than a larger number of unverifiable ones.

No commercial mill database we know of measures or publishes its own error rate, so there is no external benchmark to put 38 percent against. We publish ours, together with the method, so a reader can judge the numbers on the same evidence we do. The measured rates and the review method are documented on the methodology page.

Capacity by country

As of 2026-08-28, WoodComp's register holds 126 published pulp mills and biorefineries in Europe. 116 are operating, and 88 of those carry a verified headline pulp capacity, together 39 201 400 tonnes per year. The remaining 28 operating mills carry no figure because no source publishes one in the pulp quantity, and an empty field is the correct answer in that case.

Beyond capacity, 66 of the 116 operating mills also carry reported actual production, year by year, taken from environmental statements, annual reports and public registers. Where a company does not publish per-mill production, that absence is documented rather than estimated.

How to read these numbers

• The quantity is pulp, in tonnes per year. A figure that measures paper, board or mixed products is never counted here, whatever the source calls it. Where a mill reports in air-dried tonnes against a capacity in tonnes, the two are not compared.
• Only operating mills are counted. Idled, closed and converted mills are in the register with their history, but not in these totals.
• Only whole-mill figures are summed. A mill that publishes only the capacity of one line, or only the share it sells externally, keeps that figure as a labelled sub-item on its own page and contributes nothing to the country total.
• Permit ceilings are marked as such. Where no company figure exists, an environmental permit's maximum is used and labelled as a permit ceiling, which is an upper bound rather than a nameplate.
• An empty field is a finding, not a gap. For most integrated mills, no source publishes a pulp capacity at all. We looked, documented the absence, and left the field empty rather than estimating.

Every figure links to its source on the mill's own page, together with the basis of the figure, the year it refers to, and the date we last verified it.

From capacity to actual production

Capacity says what a mill could make. Through 2026 we have also collected reported actual production, year by year, from environmental statements with per-mill input-output tables, annual reports with per-mill columns, and public registers. Each European pulp mill was tried against those sources. Where a company states that it does not publish per-mill figures, that statement is recorded with a verbatim quote, so the absence of a number is itself documented. The latest reported year is shown on each mill's page next to its capacity, tagged with the year and the kind of source, and utilisation is shown only where the reported quantity and unit match the capacity's.