Have you ever toured a paper mill?

On Tuesday Kerry and I got a tour of the paper mill about 3 km down the road from us. Many of the trees harvested from the pine forest we're working in end up in paper products at the mill. Matt and I toured the Speights brewery and Cadbury chocolate factory in Dunedin, but those are tourist tours of food factories. When I was in Russia with the Tahoe Baikal Institute we toured the waste water treatment system of the pulp mill that discharges into Lake Baikal, but we didn't really get to see the factory at work. This paper mill tour was my first time in a huge, industrial factory. Cameras aren't allowed inside, so the best I could do was a picture from the road.

Factories are fascinating to me because they're so massive and automated. Some of the machines make you feel positively insignificant like a tiny ant walking by. I'm afraid of them, in fact, and I have to rationalize with myself that the machines aren't going to fall on me or explode.

The environmental manager of the plant led our tour. They recently drastically reduced the amount of material that they were sending to the landfill by using the wood as fuel in one of their burners. It was fascinating to learn about the way materials are moved from place to place within the factory and how the waste products are reconsituted and then reused.

The mill produces paper and bleached pulp. What the heck is pulp? What do you do with it? I wondered that too. Basically it's thick paper-like sheets that are sold to companies who further process it into things like tissue and toilet paper. The only paper they produce right now is the brown paper bag type. The paper mill also recycles paper on site that they incorporate into their brown paper.

The wood is chipped and then put through an enormous digester with various chemicals under high pressue to break down the wood fibers into useable pulp. Then the pulp gets washed and bleached (the safety video convered what to do in case of a chlorine gas leak). The easiest part of the tour for me to understand was watching the paper go through its final stages. They quish out the water on enormous rollers and the paper is spun onto enormous rolls and then cut to appropriate size. A huge machine suspended from the ceiling lifts the rolls and moves them around.

Another remarkable aspect of the mill was how few people we saw. Almost all of the people we saw were sitting in front of the computers running the machines.

If you've ever driven through Gary, Indiana then you know that paper mills don't smell nearly as dear as a chocolate factory. Walking through the mill was even worse and just driving near it. There were places where I felt like I couldn't (or shouldn't!) breathe in the air. The smell permeated our clothes and hair.

I am in incredible awe of the people who design such huge and complicated facilities. I have even more respect for the people who are designing factories to be as energy and resource efficient as possible, and those people who are finding ways to make older factories (such as this one) more efficient and environmentally friendly. While I definitely think that everyone should be using less paper, we still need paper factories, so we should make them as well as we possibly can.

Have you toured or worked in a factory? A paper factory?

Carrie