Gunns managing director Greg L'Estrange said the company would focus on meeting the August deadline to have substantial site work under way after it secured the last federal environmental permits it needed yesterday.

Federal Environment Minister Tony Burke announced his approval of the marine permit applications, which have been two years in the making and cost more than $5 million.

Mr L'Estrange said that the permits and the company's commitment to move out of native forests as part of the state's forest reforms removed the last barriers for financiers.

In reaction to yesterday's decision:

Anti-pulp mill groups warned that yesterday's federal permit approvals signalled the start of a protest

campaign that would be bigger than the anti-Franklin dam blockades of the early 1980s.

Former Gunns executive chairman John Gay said that he was delighted the ``last hurdle'' to starting

work on the pulp mill had been removed. He said it should have happened five years ago.

Mr Burke said that the pulp mill plan now specified that Gunns would use only plantation timber for

the mill and a bleaching process that used less chlorate than first proposed.