Who We Are
Founded in 1942 as a general industrial paper store, Papelera del Nervión, S.A. we are today a diversified, modern, internationally active, and a committed to Sustainability company.
Currently, our multidisciplinary team works in 5 business areas:
- Customized packaging solutions, High Performance and ANTIOX® VCI Packaging,
- and Specific Solutions for the Steel Industry,
- Big-Bag – flexible packaging
- Printing consumables (Offset and flexo), from our PRINT-NERVION division.
- Our own masking products brand for decoration and bodywork distributors: NERPEL®
A little bit of our history
In 1942, at the then recently renamed Avenida José Antonio de Bilbao, Ciriaco Aberasturi first lit the lights of "Papelera del Nervión", which object was the paper trade in general. In those post-war years, there was a paper coil next to the cash register of all shops, so it didn't need a big industry to get the business going. Even so, Aberasturi did pay special attention to the needs of those small workshops, especially the steelmaking ones, which were gradually remade and which ended up setting the course for what today, so many years later, is Papelera del Nervión, one of the main Spanish suppliers of technical packaging for the industry.
In the 1970s, with a growing clientele, Aberasturi moved the warehouse to Artasamina Street and gave way to José Manuel Arzoz, father of the current manager. He arrived in time to help the founder to face the great change that would take place the next decade. "Until that time in shops everything was packed with paper and in the factories cardboard was used and, if necessary, blankets. But at that point in the shops, plastic bags began to become popular, and bubble plastic and foams began to become popular in the workshops. It was a change that could have left us off the market because it also coincided with a period of crisis for the steel industry that our warehouse served."
You had to reinvent yourself, specialize in technical packaging that the steel industry that survived the debacle was going to need. The firm then moved to the Ribera de Deusto, where it installs its first machines, dedicated to the transformation of raffia and masking papers (the ones used in decoration and automotive not to stain) and, on the other hand, to the preparation of tri-layer packaging -paper and plastic joined by an inner mesh-. Quite a leap that the company managed to take without losing control (“loosing the papers” in the Spanish expression).
The company carried out its industrial activity in Bilbao from its foundation until 2007, when its facilities in Ribera de Deusto, 17 were clearly insufficient to assimilate the constant growth of the company, so it moved to its current site in Mungia, in modern, spacious and efficient facilities, including offices, warehouse and production area.
(The Papelera building, as our former plant in Deusto is still known, due to its value as an industrial heritage, has been recovered and converted first into a cultural center and recently into the Kunsthal Design Superior Center.)
Partial source: Article "Platinum Weddings Without Losing Papers" in El Correo, 18.05.2017, on the occasion of our 75th anniversary.
