Our Servas hosts Brenda and Jimmy Paul live in Kawerau, where Jimmy works in the paper mill. I asked him about him about visiting the plant and he graciously arranged a tour for us. The plant has been in operation since the 1960s, when it was locally owned. At its peak in the 1990s, it ran three paper machines 24/7 and employed 3,000 people. Now it is owned by a Norwegian company, employs a few hundred people and operates just one machine.

Requisite safety gear for the tour

Pine trees are grown in large plantations for both paper making and logs. The top third of the tree, containing the softest wood is used for paper. The wood is chopped up into chips, then cooked in a huge pressure cooker, which turns it into pulp which is fed into the paper making machine.

Equipment for cooking wood chips into pulp

The paper mill processes a pile of logs like this in just one day.

Wood chips being fed into the cooker

Paper production begins at this end of the machine where a slurry of 99.5% water and 0.5% pulp is sprayed onto a nylon mesh screen.

Water is extracted using a vacuum process, a continuous belt of felt and dozens of heated rollers. It takes only 9 seconds for the pulp to be converted to paper from one end of the mill to the other.

Here the paper roll is cut into lengths of about 5 ft and shorter.

A single roll of paper is 65 kilometers long!

Finished rolls ready to be shipped

Forklifts equipped with special suction heads are used to load paper rolls onto rail cars.

This experience has given me a new perspective on the paper we use every day.

David