western paper mills

[Anonymous]

I'm from Wisconsin and the paper mills around here use pulp wood for their raw materials. I am modeling a freelanced railroad located in Idaho and I have a paper mill that needs to be fed with raw materials. Do paper mills in that area use pulp like here in Wisconsin or do they use chips??

Thanks

BNSF Dave

[Anonymous]

It depends on the papers that the mill is producing and how many lines it has. The paper industry has steadily closed mills while significantly raising the productivity of existing mills. A few new mills have been built but these are in the minority. Mills will have anywhere from 50 to over a couple of hundred recipes for all the paper they produce. Almost all paper is a blend of hard and soft woods, each type of fiber lending a characteristic. As M.W. Hemphill mentions a lot of mills have an onsite pulping process but may still have been supplied bales of pulped bats of hardwood or softwood made at other plants. The pulping process is interesting in that they age the chips. Softwood is aged 5-7 days and Hardwood is aged 3-5 days. Theses same ingredients plus other parts of the recipe are mixed to produce kraft paper or tissue paper and almost anything between. Both of these come from the same mill but from two different lines. Mills west of the Cascades use Douglas Fir, Western Hemlock (these two are so characteristically the same they are also referred to as Hem/Fir though untreated hemlock has low resistance to rot) and to a small degree Spruce for it's softwood part of the blend. Western Red Alder, Big Leaf Maple are usually part of the hardwood component. East of the Cascades will see Hem/Fir replaced with a variety of Pine. Ponderosa Pine being a big one for Oregon, California and Washington. The species will change with location but the paper produced is to an industry standard. But there is a lot of latitude with in a standard. More and more paper of certain types have to perform under secondary (e.g. high speed colored print) and even terciary (e.g. envelope insertion) machine process. Labratory analysis will determine what part of the country your 20# bond came from.

[Anonymous]

M.W.Hemphill

Yup. Good catch. It's now corrected.
I see in profile you hail from Arkansas. We were getting some of paper from the Domtar paper mill in your state. The thing that we ran into was problems from the acclimation process particularily moisture. Paper is still a living product and minor things as moisture content can turn paper from a darling to a devil. Important when running from roll to finished product with a stamp.

What are the softwood and hardwood species most common for paper in your neck of the woods?

Mike

[Anonymous]

I can understand that. I lived in six states and saw them all except Hawaii by my 18th birthday. The tough part was trying to graduate from high school as each state had a state history requirement that needed to be met for a diploma. Each one thought that was the first thing that needed tending to. So I got California, Washington, Virginia and Ohio.