A forestry village of 400 people in the central North Island could host New Zealand’s first integrated wood processing hub, after NZ Bio Forestry signed a heads of agreement with local iwi Ngāti Manawa to turn logs and mill residues into high-value timber, biochemicals and aviation fuel at Kaingaroa.
That is according to chief executive Wayne Mulligan, who confirmed an industrial site has been identified and is now moving through consent, with construction expected to start late this year.
“Both Murupara and Kaingaroa suffered significant economic decline,” Mulligan said, tracing the slide to the forestry reforms and privatisation of state assets that saw the NZ Forest Service shut its village operations in the late 1980s. The surrounding land was returned to iwi at the time, yet the jobs that once sustained 1,000 residents never came back.
The blueprint borrows from Scandinavia, where harvest, sawmilling, energy generation and biochemical processing routinely share a single industrial site. A wood engineering facility for high-value products would anchor the hub, feeding its residues into a biorefinery that turns out glucose bases, lactic acids and polymers bound for ethanol and sustainable aviation fuel.
Wood Central understands the village sits deep inside the Kaingaroa estate, nearly 190,000 hectares of planted radiata pine on land owned by a central North Island iwi collective and managed by Kaingaroa Tipu, the forest manager formerly known as Timberlands.
Ngāti Manawa, which represents 5,000 mana whenua across the Kaingaroa and Murupara district, has watched forestry restructuring drain the villages for more than 30 years. Chair Kani Edwards said the deal reaches past industry to jobs, skills and the prospect of whānau prospering at home rather than leaving to find work.
“If we get this right, it would be incredible,” Edwards told RNZ during the project’s feasibility stage, nominating a sawmill among the operations he wants inside the hub for a district carrying some of the highest unemployment in the Bay of Plenty.
Kaingaroa’s population now stands at 400, of whom 98 per cent are Māori, down from a peak of 1,000 three decades ago. An $11 million community development project announced in July 2024 has already delivered roading and village infrastructure upgrades ahead of any industrial build.
NZ Bio Forestry launched in 2018 with shareholders in Singapore and Taiwan and has spent eight years developing technology that converts plantation biomass into biofuels, biochemicals and biomaterials. Alongside its Taiwanese partners, the company won a Global Top 100 R&D Award for FixCarbon, a carbon-negative bioplastic derived from afforestation.
Mark Ross, chief executive of the Wood Processors and Manufacturers Association of New Zealand, welcomed the project’s scale and said the sector needs exactly this kind of regional hub, with Kaingaroa an ideal location for timber, people and transport. His endorsement follows the government naming wood processing a priority area for InvestNZ, the agency chasing investments of $100 million to $1 billion.
Capital looms as the biggest hurdle, with Mulligan conceding sovereign funds are unlikely backers because they hunt existing income streams. Funding talks span onshore and offshore investors, he said, and the money exists for anyone shown the case stacks up.
The agreement surfaces as New Zealand wood processing sheds capacity at pace, with the Juken closure at Kaitāia capping a two-year run that has stripped 570 jobs from mills including Kinleith, Eves Valley, Karioi and Tangiwai. A new-build hub would push the other way, working the same residue and low-grade log pool the Bioeconomy Science Institute says could feed a domestic bioenergy industry from seven million green tonnes a year.
Rail wagons out of the central North Island still queue for the export berths at Tauranga, yet the same port city holds proof of the other end of the chain, with the mass timber tower Mareanui claiming New Zealand’s supreme property award.
Forestry occupies 1.8 million hectares of New Zealand land compared with dairy’s 2 million yet returns a quarter of the income, Mulligan said, and Kaingaroa now shapes as the first hard test of whether wood fibre can earn more at home than it does on a log ship.
