The meter-thick rolls of paper are stacked as high as a multi-storey house, sorted according to what they will be used for one day. In the past, says Jörg Zech, head warehouse clerk at Sperber, he used to have these vast quantities delivered for catalogs such as those from the mail order company Quelle and delivered them to printers. “There are no longer catalogs like this,” says Zech, “everything on the screen.” Most of the paper stored in the 7000 square meter hall in the Nuremberg harbor is processed into packaging material. Part of it goes to the IT company Datev, which uses it to print the payslips for millions of employees. And the cardboard columns right next to them become coffee mugs.
The camp, and indeed the entire Sperber company, would have to give way if the Bund Naturschutz (BN) got its way. Likewise, the neighboring building material recycling company Durmin and the scrap processing plant of the company Derichebourg. Joachim Zimmermann and Peter Stäblein, one head of the state-owned Bayernhafen AG and the other managing director of the port of Nuremberg, have invited the three companies to visit. To show that they consider an idea of the BN, which has been hotly debated in and around Nuremberg for weeks, to be unrealistic, to put it diplomatically.
Bayernhafen managing director Peter Stäblein doesn’t really like the conservationists’ idea.
(Photo: Bayernhafen)
The nature conservation association wants to ensure that the ICE maintenance workshop, which Deutsche Bahn wants to build for 400 million euros, is not built at one of the three preferred locations near Feucht or Allersberg, because a lot of forest would have to be cleared there. But in the Nuremberg harbor, where a water basin in the vicinity of Sperber, Derichebourg and Durmin is to be filled anyway. Three hectares of land will be gained in this way and with a few more currently vacant plots of land, a smaller ICE plant could be built there. This is how the BN measured it using Google Maps and looked it up during an on-site visit. A milkmaid’s bill for port boss Stäblein. “The ICE plant needs up to 40 hectares of space,” he says. How the eleven hectares of space in the port specified by the BN should be enough is “a mathematical challenge that I can’t understand”.
In addition, the free plots of land and the harbor basin would be needed to cover the demand from companies that has already been deposited. “It is completely impossible to provide the necessary space without destroying the structure of the port,” warns Bayernhafen boss Zimmermann. The area in the south of Nuremberg, which is 470 football pitches in size, is full of loading and unloading facilities for rail, water and road transport, as well as more than 200 companies. They handle goods in an interplay that has been balanced and sophisticated over decades. Their long-term leases will run for decades, and forced relocation would trigger an avalanche of lawsuits. “We will vehemently oppose the port being used for the ICE plant,” announces Zimmermann.
More goods were handled at the Nuremberg port last year than in the previous year. It is loaded onto ships, but also onto trains and trucks.
(Photo: Bayernhafen)
Sperber, Durmin and Derichebourg are just three of the many companies threatened by the BN idea that are not easy to relocate simply because of their emissions. They link delivery and onward transport by rail, ship and truck. Sperber, for example, transports waste paper by ship and rail to foreign factories, which in turn deliver the paper rolls. In Nuremberg, Derichebourg delivers pre-sorted scrap metal to steelworks “all of which are on the waterfront,” says branch manager Günther Lutz.
As far as goods handling by rail and ship is concerned, the Nuremberg port was significantly more successful in 2021 with growth of 12.1 and 17.5 percent respectively than Bayernhafen AG overall (plus 4.6 percent), which also includes the ports in Aschaffenburg, Bamberg, Roth, Regensburg and Passau belong. The basin in Nuremberg will not be filled up because the transport of goods by water is declining, but because the ships can be loaded and unloaded more quickly thanks to modern crane systems and therefore have less time in the port, says Peter Stäblein. So the BN proposal is likely to fail in reality, even if the railway and the city assure you that they will examine it seriously.
Moreover, the debate about the ICE plant is no longer under a good star since politics got involved in the search for a location. This “unnecessarily undermined the acceptance of the project and the credibility of the project, which is so important in public,” criticized Sebastian Körber, chairman of the transport committee in the state parliament. The FDP politician’s accusation is aimed at Prime Minister Markus Söder, who “torpedoed the project with hasty statements and decisions”. Körber accuses him of “interfering with the selection process for the second time”. The railway originally favored a location on the outskirts of the Nuremberg districts of Altenfurt and Fischbach, some of which belong to Söder’s constituency. When civil protests flared up there, the state government announced that it would under no circumstances make the necessary forest available there because it was too valuable. With that, the location was off the table.
In the meantime, Söder has intervened a second time, says Körber, quoting from a letter to the CSU local chairman von Feucht in the state parliament. In it, Söder wrote that the state government had already come to the conclusion in Altenfurt/Fischbach that under the given circumstances no state forest areas could be made available for the construction of the ICE maintenance workshop. In Feucht, “at first glance, the circumstances were similar”.
Söder did not write this as CSU party leader, but with the letterhead of the Prime Minister and with a copy to the responsible ministries for transport and the environment. “That’s a clear sign of the fence post that the ministries must take as an instruction from the very top,” says Körber. As a result, the Prime Minister is getting involved in the ongoing regional planning process, in which these two locations near Feucht are being examined. “He is politically torpedoing the search for a location,” says Körber’s accusation. “This is outrageous and unacceptable.”