About - Foresta

About Us

Featured Project: Bay of Plenty

Foresta is building a plant in Bay of Plenty, New Zealand where we will manufacture pine chemicals and pine wood pellets; completely transforming the energy industry by providing a clean energy source. This will be a direct coal replacement, we welcome your enquiry to partner with us as a wood pellet customer or forestry provider.

What Drives us?

Foresta has a team of individuals who are on board with the vision of the company, people who can see the bigger picture and know that our job is much more than pine trees and their products. It is about totally transforming the way we harvest and re-plant the forests to ensure they are looked after and are available for years to come. It is about using sustainable processes, being mindful of what we are mixing into our manufacturing processes as these chemicals and pellets reach a wide range of markets and different industries, which impact every single persons day to day life. We have an impact on what is being distributed, so we want that to be clean and safe for all who come into contact with it. We are pioneering a new way by replacing the coal with wood pellets as fuel for energy and working with local forestry farmers, Iwi’s and Governments to better the state of the surrounding forests, and that is what drives us.

Why Foresta?

Foresta has taken a best supplier, best practice approach to designing and planning its operations. Ensuring that the most energy efficient and lowest environmentally impacting processes are used in its operations, whilst achieving the highest quality products supported by the best suppliers in our industry.

We developed our own patented extraction process for the renewable natural chemicals that uses the natural oils of the pine tree as the extractive, eliminating nearly 25% of extra processing and petrochemicals.

Our process increases the potential income from the pine wood, ensuring a truly sustainable future for pine, at the same time we enable real decarbonisation of our nation.

Utilising sustainable forestry resources to manufacture biomass products

Our History

The company Essential Queensland Pty Ltd was formed in 2017, we had a pilot plant in Childers Queensland, Australia where we produced turpentine and rosin. In December 2020 we completed a backdoor listing on Leaf Resources Ltd, we continued to operate in Childers however once recognising the great potential in forestry supply in New Zealand, we made the decision to move our operations to NZ. We then acquired a large scale commercial plant that will be erected in Rotorua, New Zealand under the name of Foresta (NZ) Limited.

Founder’s Story

My name is Ray Mountfort, I grew up on a sheep, beef and forestry farm in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. When I was 12 years old, my parents signed what was then New Zealand’s first agriculture forestry joint venture and planted radiata pine trees on the back slopes of the farm. I found it fun to be involved with the crushing and burning of the scrub and land preparation for those pine trees.
At the age of 13 I started surfing and by 18 it was the ruling passion in my life. Surfing enabled me to connect with nature, the ocean and build great friendships as well as keep fit. I consider Murphy’s Motor Camp at Matata my home break; it’s located at the end of the road from the farm I grew up on. My first surf board was shaped by one of my best mates and named for our local break being ‘White Sands’ as this was the name of the Motor Camp, prior to Murphy’s.
In my late teens while surfing at Otamorakau, a further 10km up the coast towards Tauranga, I encountered something that is common at the beaches at Matata and the Tarawera River Outlet. This was the smelly toxic discharge from the Tarawera River that originated inland at the Tasman Pulp and Paper Mill. Such was the pollution that upon arriving home at the farm, my whole family could smell me from a distance of several metres. My eyes were smarting and I smelt of sulphur and the mill.
I couldn’t believe that the Mill could do this to my local beach and to all of us who lived there and called it home. My dad is 81 today, and he can still remember my anger at being exposed to these chemicals and how the discharge must be damaging our fishery.
This experience in my late teens had a profound impact on my world view in regards to factories, pollution and their interaction with our environment. It has been with me ever since and has had tremendous influence when I realised that I had the opportunity to invent and commercialise new non destructive processes for processing pine into chemicals and bio products.
This is why the process Foresta utilises the natural chemicals in the tree to extract the natural chemicals from the tree, eliminating smelly, toxic waste water discharges.