CLASSEN: Anniversary for the largest laminate plant in the world

Baruth / Mark. 20 years ago, in the fall of 2001, the CLASSEN Group opened its plant in Baruth (Brandenburg). It started with 120 employees. Today, it is the largest single laminate plant in the world. Around 850 employees in Baruth produce up to 80 million square meters of high-quality laminate flooring per year for the global market. This means that laminate the size of a 20-square-meter living room leaves production every seven seconds. By 2020, the first billion square meters of laminate had been produced, which is enough to cover the entire island of Rügen.

CLASSEN made the decision to relocate to Baruth in 2000, as the former laminate plant in Kaisersesch (Rhineland-Palatinate) was already bursting at the seams. CLASSEN had doubled its production capacity every two years since 1995. A new location was needed and Baruth was carefully selected. There was already a sawmill and a manufacturer of HDF boards on the other side of the road, so that synergy effects could be exploited from the outset. In addition, there is good quality local wood in Brandenburg.

Many long-standing employees remember the beginnings of this project. Like Norbert Nahler, who helped plan the new plant as head of CLASSEN's technical office. When he saw the new 50-hectare site for the first time, the goals were already ambitious: “‘We are planning to start production here next year,’ my managing director told me. And there I was, looking out over a huge area of woodland! When we got the layout of the site, we set about the initial planning. We obtained plans of the existing machines in Kaisersesch, drew the machines on paper to a certain scale, cut them out and then lined them up. And we ended up with a plant length of 350 meters!”

An important success factor for the site was the fact that the right employees were quickly found, as Ronald Ante, then Head of Production in Kaisersesch and now Head of the CLASSEN Group's Application Technology department, recalls: “In Baruth, we got excellently qualified staff, trained in the GDR. In contrast to the West, these were not only men in technical professions, but also women, who had a very good basis for quickly learning how to use the new machines.”

Tatsächlich konnte CLASSEN wie geplant 2001 die ersten Produktionslinien für Laminat in Betrieb nehmen. Schon 2003 wurde das komplette neue Werk gespiegelt und die Kapazitäten verdoppelt. Wenig später folgte der Bau eines eigenen Plattenwerks in Baruth und im August 2007 presste CLASSEN dort seine erste HDF-Platte als Träger für seine Laminatböden. Heute stehen auf dem Werksgelände insgesamt rund 250.000 Quadratmeter Hallenfläche, das entspricht der Fläche von 35 Fußballfeldern in der Bundesliga.

Employees from western Germany also found their way to Brandenburg, such as Heinz-Josef Goeke, Head of Mechanical Maintenance in the CLASSEN Group's wood fiberboard production in Baruth: “My first impression of the plant was: Wow! I had never seen anything so clean before. I was thrilled! And I have already seen many wood processing plants, including those of CLASSEN's direct competitors. Today, I can say that here in Baruth, we not only invest in cleanliness, but also in maintenance to keep the plant at a high level. I am still amazed by everything that is done here at the plant to ensure environmentally friendly production.”

As in all its plants, the CLASSEN Group is continuously improving its energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Baruth. For example, waste from production such as wood chips and wood dust is used to generate energy and heat in the company's own biomass power plant and fed back into production. This saves up to 7,000 tons of CO₂ annually. In total, CLASSEN operates three energy plants on the site for energy and heat generation using biomass and natural gas with a total output of around 130 megawatts.

For the Managing Director of CLASSEN Industries, Carsten Buhlmann, who came to Baruth as Plant Manager in 2000 and has accompanied and shaped the development of the site from the very beginning, the success is largely down to the employees: “From the very beginning, we also provided training and thus practically raised our own specialists. The majority of the workforce here comes from the region. This is another reason why the employees are so closely connected to our plant. Everyone is part of a gearbox that is interlinked.”

Employees talk about their memories of the Baruth site here in the CLASSEN blog: https://blog.classengroup.com/category/20-jahre-baruth/

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