History

The company began its activities on March 31, 1962 in the Guarapuava region, located in the center-south of Paraná state in the south of Brazil. Initially, it was a sawmill that catered to the national timber market. After that, a thermo mechanical pulp (TMP) factory was built.

In the early 1970s the company began a new cycle. The transformation process started with the São Manoel reforestation facility, planting its first pine seedlings. Next came the construction of the São Pedro Power Plant, which was intended to fuel Santa Maria´s first paper mill, a project that came to supply the much needed electrical energy that was so sparse in the region.

The search for the land where the paper mill would be built on couldn´t be for just any land. The locale had to have a river that would guarantee the supply of water necessary for production, besides being ample enough for future factory expansion. In January, 1972, the founders had uncovered the place where the factory would be built, located on the banks of the Coutinho River, 23 kilometers from the city of Guarapuava.

Ten months after starting the assembly of Paper Machine I, the São Pedro Plant came into operation, a project that would provide energy for the realization of a dream. And so it happened. It was February 21, 1974, when the machine was put into operation for the first time. At exactly four o'clock in the afternoon, by use of the mechanical pulp from the Santa Maria do Oestes Factory, the first sheets of Santa Maria paper arrived into the world. This machine would later go on to produce more than ten different types of paper.

After years of work, Santa Maria began to gain space in the national paper market. In the early 1980s, the company began to expand its sales to the international market, beginning with Europe and the Middle East.

A man ahead of his time, Manoel Vieira wanted to expand Santa Maria´s presence in the paper market. That was when he decided to buy a second paper mill, called Paper Machine II. Its assembly began in December of 1981 with the placement of the rails, and in December 1982, the first salable paper was produced. Together with the new machine, the Curucaca Power Plant was put into operation and was responsible for maintaining the company's energy self-sufficiency.

Santa Maria decided to diversify its investments and expand its agricultural activities, which were still rather timid since the 1980s. So in the early 1990s, the company began investing in grains and the acquisition of farms to plant soybeans, corn, and wheat. Later, in 2002, a silo was built to optimize the company's agricultural sector with a storage capacity of 36 thousand tons, apart from expansions in the forestry business.

In the beginning of the 1990s, the company returned to its origins, from which it had been away from since the start of its involvement in paper production. In time, this venture would revolutionize the very concept of sawmills in Brazil. As soon as it was inaugurated, Santa Maria began to export wood panels and frames from its own reforestation project and sold them to clients in the United States and Europe.

Santa Maria always valued work in favor of the environment, understanding its importance and anticipating a need that until then, many did not worry about. Therefore, the company invested in the construction of a new Effluent Treatment Station, a fundamental process to treat all water used in the paper-making process.

Concerned about expanding sales figures with a globally recognized certification, Santa Maria attained the FSC® - Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC-C021980) Chain of Custody certification, in September 2009. This certification recognizes that the company uses only raw materials from controlled sources that do not exploit slave or child labor and also respects the rights of workers and their social and economic well-being. Since then the company has already expanded the scope of the certification at the São Manoel reforestation center, which won the FSC certificate for Forest Management (FSC-C133520) in 2016.

On April 8, Globo Rural magazine presented Santa Maria’s “Fazenda Três Capões” as the most sustainable farm in the country in the category of annual crops. The main aspects that guaranteed the award to the farm of 790 hectares were its strong administrative management combined with the environmental management which was totally in accordance with the principles of sustainability.

In January of 2014 work began to increase the Curucaca plant´s energy potential, which had a generation of 7.4 MW and would be increased to 37 MW. The construction was made possible by a partnership with the Agrarian Cooperative and began generating power in May, 2016.

During all these years, Santa Maria has received several awards. Currently, the company is among the 500 largest agribusiness companies in the country, being ranked since 2007. Before that it had been counted among the 500 largest companies in the South of Brazil as well as the 100 largest in the state of Paraná since 2004, according to Amanhã Magazine. Additionally, in 2017 and since then, the company has received the GPTW (Great Place to Work) certificate.