HELSINKI, Finland, March 24, 2003 -- Stora Enso today announced that Stora Enso will build a peroxide bleaching plant at its Veitsiluoto Mills to enhance the quality of magazine paper products. The biological effluent treatment plant will also be enlarged to meet future wastewater treatment requirements. The project will start in April 2003 and is scheduled to be completed in May 2004. Capital expenditure on the project will amount to EUR 30 million. Peroxide bleaching will improve the quality, especially the brightness, of coated mechanical grades to meet customer requirements, and will facilitate development of new top-quality paper grades for the magazine paper market. The Veitsiluoto Mills' biological effluent treatment plant was built in 1988. The new peroxide bleaching system and the wastewater from the fine paper machines would increase the BOD7 (Biological Oxygen Demand) and COD (Chemical Oxygen Demand) load if the plant were not modernised. The modernised wastewater treatment plant will use the best available technology and meet future environmental demands as well. Veitsiluoto Mills in Kemi, Finland are an integrated production facility manufacturing office papers, coated mechanical papers and sawn products. Its annual production capacity is 865,000 tonnes of paper and 290,000 cubic metres of sawn products. It is the fourth-biggest among paper and paperboard mills in Europe and has 1,500 employees.