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Pulp and Paper Presence
The legendary timber rafts of the 19th century
have long ago disappeared from the Ottawa
River, but logging trucks are still a familiar
sight on the highways of the Ottawa River
corridor. The region's forests now support
pulp and paper and newsprint production
plants in the Lower Ottawa River communities
of Masson, Buckingham, Thurso, the
city of Hull, and the lower Lake
Temiskaming town of TĖmiscaming.
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What's
That Smell?
Does the smell of a pulp and
paper town make you wrinkle
up your nose? If it does, blame
the pulp, not the paper. The
pulp-making process, which uses
heat and chemicals to cook the
wood chips and separate the
wood fibres, produces gaseous
sulfur compounds called "total
reduced sulfur" or "TRS
gases," most often described
as having a "rotten egg"
or "rotten cabbage"
odour. Paper making plants that
import pulp from other mills
are free of the pulp plant's
signature smell.
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• Of the major pulp, paper and paperboard
producers in the world, Canada ranks 4th,
with Quebec supplying almost a third (9.6
million metric tons) of the 30 million metric
ton national total.
• Canada leads the world in newsprint
production, with Quebec contributing just
under 4 million metric tonnes of the country's
9.2 million metric ton total.
• In 2001, Quebec's pulp and paper
industry provided 34,000 jobs, about 45%
of the total employment created by forest
product production.
• The Outaouais (Ottawa) region, including
plants in Hull, Masson and Thurso, contributes
12.5% of the total Quebec pulp, paper and
paperboard production. The Abitibi-TĖmiscamingue
and Nord-du-Quebec region contributes 8.9%.
• Wood chips provide 70% of the fibres
used in Quebec pulp and paper mills.
•Other fibre sources include pulpwood
sent directly to the paper mill, and recycled
paper and paperboard.
Producing Pulp
and Paper
• Wet-stripping is the process
of stripping pulpwood logs of their bark
by tumbling them together in large drums.
The bark is recovered and used as a fuel
to produce steam for other production processes
in the plant.
• Mechanical pulp is produced
by crushing stripped logs with grinders,
and soaking them with water. Mechanical
pulp is most suitable for lower-strength
papers such as newsprint and paperboards.
• Thermomechanical pulp is produced
by grinding wood chips in refiners using
steam at high pressures and temperatures.
• Chemithermomechanical pulp
is produced when chemicals are used along
with steam. Wood chips are cooked in vat-style
digesters to dissolve lignins and release
long wood fibres. Chemical pulp is used
to manufacture higher strength printing
and writing papers.
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The
Town that Saved its Pulp Mill
In 1973, when employees in the
town of Témiscaming,
Quebec, learned that their only
industry was about to be shut
down, they took matters into
their own hands. They refused
to give up on an industry and
a company town that had been
established by the Riordan Company
in 1919, and operated since
1925 by Canadian International
Paper. Millworkers, townspeople
and ex-company managers banded
together to form a new company,
Tembec, to own and operate the
pulp mill. Two years of struggle,
confrontation and negotiation,
a sizeable financial investment
by employees, and a precedent-setting
worker participation and profit-sharing
plan resulted in the re-opening
of the mill in 1975. Tembec
is now one of Canada's largest
integrated forest products companies,
with over $4 billion in annual
sales, and nearly 10,000 employees
worldwide. |
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• Recycled pulp is made from
waste paper and paperboard which is ground
in large vats known as pulpers. Chemicals
are sometimes added to the mixture. Recycled
pulp is used to make paperboard or sanitary
paper, or is mixed with virgin pulp to make
other products. De-inking processes
use chemicals or soaps to dislodge the ink
from wood fibres.
• Bleaching whitens the paper
and increases its absorbency by using chemicals
to further dissolve the lignin that binds
the wood fibres. Environmental concerns
have led to the use of chlorine bleaching
alternatives such as chlorine dioxide and
hydrogen peroxide.
• Sheeting is the process of
spraying the watery pulp mixture onto a
massive moving canvas, equipped with a suction
system that extracts the moisture and forms
a solid sheet.
• Drying takes place when the
sheet comes in contact with steam-heated
cylinders.
• Calendars are the immense
rollers of heated steel, compress and smooth
the surface of the sheet.
• Finishing processes determine
paper product types, including fine papers,
coated papers, packaging materials and specialty
papers. |
