The paper machine industry parades in Lucca

The Italian paper machinery industry meets at the Miac trade fair (from 8 to 10 October, 250 international exhibitors) in Lucca, one of the most important districts in the world for the paper sector, on the strength of the brilliant results of 2024-2025, which have made it possible to recover the ground lost during the Covid period and conquer new markets (the sector exports 95%). In particular, the segment of toilet paper and household paper technologies (kitchen towels, napkins, handkerchiefs), the so-called tissue in which the Lucca district specialises, has grown in South America and Central America and has held its own in Europe and the USA. In 2026, the aim is to consolidate results.

"American tariffs do not frighten us," explained Giovanni Gambini, coordinator of the paper mechanics group of Confindustria Toscana Nord, opening the exhibition, "because if the Americans want to produce toilet paper, they have to come and buy from us. Italian technologies are world leaders in the converting segment (the machines for transforming reel-to-reel paper into commonly used paper products, ed.).

Lucca's paper machinery district - a hundred or so companies with three thousand employees and a turnover of around 900 million - is continuing to invest (also) on the production front: Gambini itself (80 million revenue 2025, 95% of which is exported) has just opened a 3,500 square metre plant in Joinville, Brazil. The investment was 10 million euro, and the workforce is currently about twenty, but will increase. The aim is to produce for the South American market, thus avoiding the heavy tariffs applied by Brazil.

On the research and development front, however, the Lucchese district's efforts are focused on energy saving, worker safety, noise reduction, and the push towards automation to reduce risks. Energy remains at the forefront of the concerns of both manufacturers and their customers, the paper companies, who together launched yet another alarm at the opening of Miac: 'The paper industry, which in Italy employs 19,000 workers and generates €8.3 billion in turnover, is in serious difficulty due to the highest energy costs in Europe,' said Assocarta president Lorenzo Poli. 'Plants, energy-hungry by nature, risk coming to a standstill while the country loses competitiveness,' he added.

In the first seven months of 2025, paper production slumped by 2.5% and turnover in the first half of the year fell by 3.1% to about EUR 4.2 billion. Gas price differential, Ets compensation and energy release are the three areas on which Assocarta is asking the government to intervene. On a local level, there are also the costs that companies in Lucca have to bear for the disposal of pulper waste, which cannot in fact be recycled on an industrial scale, and which could generate energy: "The absence of a regional policy for the disposal of the materials that remain from processing penalises us," stressed Tiziano Pieretti, president of the paper section of Confindustria Toscana nord.