Pro Nemus
Riitta Koivisto |
Pro Nemus—on behalf of the forest. Metsä Group’s visitor center is a destination worth traveling from afar. This innovative, next-generation visitor center offers fascinating sights and experiences for the whole family. For the curious, the center provides new information about the forest industry and Metsä Group’s wide-ranging operations, and for the conscious consumer, surprising insights into sustainability. You can also learn by experiencing; set off on an adventure to the Äänekoski Bioproduct Mill, as well as other Metsä mills, in virtual worlds, or head into forest work aboard a harvester simulator. As a souvenir, you can snap photos in the Photobooth.
Images of factories and their surroundings are familiar to many. As a child, I would follow my father around the factory area when he visited his workplace. In elementary school, we made visits to the factory; I saw and heard how they operate. As a teenager, I had a summer job as a cleaner at a veneer factory, making daily rounds of the plant’s offices, machines, and halls. Not particularly inspiring or interesting.
In my free time, I have visited a factory museum presenting the history of an old paper mill from decades ago. As I’ve grown older, historical perspectives have interested me too, and visiting this kind of attraction has been both entertaining and educational. In Äänekoski, a destination like this also offered a completely new perspective. Metsä Group’s Pro Nemus presents its operations to every visitor transparently and up to date, and it doesn’t look much to the time before today; on the contrary, it looks forward.
Spacious and novel
Upon stepping into Pro Nemus, you almost forget you’re in a factory area. The building’s architecture, surfaces, and views are truly of today, and at first glance you might think you’re exploring new building materials and interior design. The lobby areas and restrooms are stylish and meticulously thought through. The wooden interior materials in the restrooms draw attention, and the lobby’s wooden hangers, where coats are placed for the duration of the visit, are so stylish you’d want the same on your own coat rack. However, Pro Nemus wasn’t visited to admire the decor, so you quickly move on, admiring the spaciousness and brightness of the spaces while glancing out through the large windows at the factory area.
A visit to Pro Nemus begins over a cup of coffee, listening to a short briefing about Metsä Group’s strong value chain, which ends on the store shelf after many stages starting from soil preparation, so that the growth conditions for the raw material of the products we buy, i.e., wood, are as good as possible. From the very first moments of the visit, you’ll be surprised and delighted by how comprehensive and responsible Metsä Group’s operations are, and how they are at the forefront of the circular economy.
You follow Metsä Group’s logistics on a huge touch screen, examine the end products we see on store shelves, and admire the gigantic moss wall and stunning photographs. With the harvester, you get to head into the forest to fell trees. In the virtual world, you can enter the Äänekoski Bioproduct Mill and a few other production facilities. But you won’t know anything unless you try it yourself...