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The Sartell Paper Mill, officially the Verso Paper Sartell Mill, was a paper mill located in the city of Sartell in the U.S. state of Minnesota, operating from 1905 until a disastrous explosion in 2012. [1]
The original company, Watab Pulp and Paper, was conceived by a group of lumbermen from Wisconsin and Michigan and was formed on May 10, 1905 with a capitalization of $200,000. The stock shares were $100 each.
It was the intent to build the mill at Sauk Rapids at the location of the Sauk Rapids Bridge, but the owners of the power rights were asking what was felt to be an exorbitant price. Watab Pulp and Paper went further upstream, to Sartell, and for a sum of $1.00 made an agreement with the owners of the existing saw mill to move it from the west side of the Mississippi River to a point just inside the village limits.
The plant started operations with No. 1 paper machine in September, 1905. No. 2 paper machine was built in 1910. The company then produced newsprint until 1930, when the conversion to groundwood book and magazine papers began.
Many changes have taken place since the days when log drives down the Mississippi River were common and the paper mill was experimenting using corn stalks as a raw material.
During the 1930s, recycled magazines were a prime source of wood pulp. The waste magazines were brought by rail from Chicago in bales weighing up to 2,000 pounds. In the “sorting room,” paper clips and staples were removed. The waste was then sent to the cookers for deinking and bleaching. The conversion plant operated through the 1930s until the end of World War II.
The war years brought other changes to the Sartell mill:
At the end of the war, the mill closed the finishing operation where paper was sheeted and cut to size. Since that time, all paper manufactured at Sartell has been shipped in roll form.
St. Regis bought Watab Pulp and Paper and its properties in 1946. The transition was smooth with minor changes in mill management.
Plant operations changed immensely. Until 1948, 100-inch wood was handled by hand. Large unloading crews handled the wood from railroad cars to a system of conveyors for building huge storage piles on the river’s edge.
Over the years, many changes had taken place with the mill’s machinery:
Another operation that is no longer performed relates to storing groundwood. In 1934, a large concrete pad was constructed for storing “lapped groundwood pulp. Because of the water-driven groundwood mill, at time of high water availability, excess groundwood was manufactured for use when the water flow was low. Separation of frozen laps was difficult during cold Minnesota winters. When separation was not possible with crowbars, dynamite was used. The lapped groundwood pulp was then brought into the mill and placed into beaters for repulping and use.
In 1957, No. 1 paper machine had a major rebuild. The same was done the following year on No. 2 paper machine. Both machines were sped up with the addition of new steam turbine drives and new headboxes.
The mill had one of the earliest supercalenders in the industry. In 1960, No. 1 and No. 2 supercalenders were installed. [2] [3]
Since the 1960s, uncoated supercalendered grades of paper have been manufactured. In the past twenty years, basis weight of these papers has been reduced from a 43-pound sheet that was used in Family Circle magazine to, in some instances, as low as 26 pound.
St. Regis was one of the first companies in the area to install equipment for fly ash removal and wastewater treatment facilities. The wastewater treatment facility was one of the first in the papermaking industry; much experimentation has been done to improve the operation. Sartell won an Izaak Walton League award for clean water related to these efforts. The mill has also been commended seven times by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency since 1985 for excellent wastewater treatment facility operation and effluent quality.
The mill has also been a pioneer in burning bark and wastewater sludge, very significant with the solid waste considerations of today. The bark burning system went into operation in 1961 and the secondary wastewater treatment system started up in April 1973.
Although the No. 3 paper machine project of 1982 is referred to as an expansion, it consisted almost of an entire mill replacement or rebuild. Virtually all areas were affected, except existing paper machine and supercalender areas. Existing water supply systems, filtration systems, shops, stores, primary electrical, and some effluent treatment facilities were all replaced. April 2000 brought an upgraded gap former installation, including a headbox which was replaced and updated with new dilution control technology.
No. 1 and No. 2 paper machines operate at 1,950 feet per minute and 1,880 feet per minute respectively and produce about 280 tons of publication grade paper per day. With the addition of No. 3 paper machine, currently operating at 4,150+ feet per minute, another 600 tons are produced daily.
As a result of a giant corporate merger in 1984, St. Regis Corporation was merged with Champion International Corporation, creating leadership in the markets of coated and uncoated publication grades and newsprint to the company’s already established positions in free-sheet paper for printing, writing, converting and business.
In June 2000, Champion was purchased by International Paper making it the world’s largest paper and forest products company.
In its last years, the mill was owned and operated by Verso Paper. On May 29, 2012, there was an explosion at the paper mill that resulted in a large fire, killing one man, injuring 4 others, and taking fourteen fire departments to put out.[ citation needed ]
On August 2, 2012, Verso announced that the Sartell mill would remain shut down permanently, putting about 260 employees out of work and ending over a century of papermaking in Sartell.
The site was sold to AIM Development USA in 2013. [4] There was another fire at the mill during demolition on September 19, 2013. [5] [6]
As of January 2023, the site remains vacant. [7]
All of the wood is received in 8-foot lengths from the forests of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. 60% is received by rail and 40% is received by truck. Wood is unloaded to the yard which has a storage capacity of 5,000 cords.
The woodroom consists of two independent processing lines with a common bark system. Each line is designed to produce 100 cords per shift of high quality, bark-free chips.
Fir is fed through the softwood line and debarked in a 12-foot by 68-foot debarking drum. Equipment has been added for log washing and deicing prior to the drum to facilitate debarking. After debarking, the wood flows through a log inspection and sorting system where individual sticks may be recycled to the drum. Properly debarked logs are directed to a 12-knife Carthage chipper. Chips are screened and conveyed to chip storage bins.
The aspen, or hardwood, line is similar to the softwood line except that logs are debarked in a Nicholson mechanical ring debarker. Wood is chipped separately and stored in a 400-cord chip bin.
The TMP plant is designed to produce up to 550 tons of pulp per day. The plant has two lines, each with three stages. Each of the six refiners are driven by two motors. The total horsepower per refining line is 32,500. The primary refiner is a pressurized unit and the secondary and tertiary refiners operate under atmospheric pressure. Chips are washed, steamed under pressure, and refined in the first stage. The pressurized refiner discharges into a cyclone which separates the pulp from the steam and supplies the pulp to the second-stage refiners. Recovered steam goes to the heat recovery system.
The TMP pulp discharged from the tertiary refiner is treated for latency removal, series screened, cleaned, thickened, and stored in two medium density storage tanks. Screened rejects are further refined, screened, and cleaned before storage. The unbleached TMP is recovered from storage and bleached to brightness levels in the bleach plant.
Bleached kraft is received in bales from Canadian mills. Fork trucks deliver a six-bale stack to bale handling equipment for destacking and dewiring. A dewiring system, the first automatic one in the industry, dewires bales before they are dumped from the conveyor to the pulper; the slush pulp is then pumped to a soak chest, refiners, and storage tank.
The process is based on the conversion of starch in the presence of clay. Coating ingredients are mixed in a slurry makedown tank, screened, and pumped continuously through various stages for enzyme addition and cooking.
Coating is discharged into a flash tank where flash steam is directed to a condensing chamber where heat is recovered as hot water. Finished coating is stored for eventual use on the paper machines.
The initial planning for No. 3 began early in 1978. Decisions were made regarding the design at that time using experience gained from the operation of No. 5 paper machine at Bucksport, Maine. Both machines are the same size and general configuration. The fabric width is 314 inches, design speed was 3,500 feet per minute, and the maximum salable trim is 280 inches. The design basis weight was 34# and at design speed, the machine would produce 480 tons per day. Modifications have since been made and No. 3 paper machine now operates at 4,150+ feet per minute, producing 600 tons of salable paper per day.
A Voith dilution control headbox was selected to improve the ability to control profile and formation.
A gap former was chosen to improve sheet formation and paper quality essential to raw stock manufacture.
The press section is a Beloit twinver with an inclined straight-through, grooved third press. This type of press section was selected because of its cleanliness during operation, efficient water removal capability, and successful operation in the past.
The main dryer section consists of 43 six-foot dryers split into four sections.
The two-roll machine calender is equipped with two variable crown rolls and heating capability for caliper control.
The Beloit short-dwell nip coaters and later EXCEL Coaters in 1998 were included to apply five pounds of coating to each side of the sheet. Conservation measures have also been taken in reclaiming coating and recycling it to the coated broke system for recovery.
From the paper machine reel, the paper is trimmed on a rereeler prior to being sent to two ten-roll Beloit supercalenders. The supercalenders impart a smooth, glossy finish to the paper’s surface, improving appearance and print quality. The paper is wound onto individual rolls on a Jagenberg vari-top single drum winder. The maximum design speed of this unit is 8,500 feet per minute. This winder is also highly automated to maximize productivity.
The paper from the entire mill is wrapped by a low profile, semi-automated roll wrapper system, averaging 750 rolls per day. Roll tickets use a barcode for identification and inventory control.
The paper warehouse can store up to 5,000 tons of finished paper and fifteen railroad cars, ten for loading paper and five for unloading kraft, can be “spotted” inside the building. This amount of storage is necessitated with this seasonable type of business.
Steam is generated in a Babcock & Wilcox stoker-fired coal boiler with a capacity of 270,000 pounds of steam per hour. The boiler is designed to burn a combination of coal, bark, wastewater sludge, and tire chips. Steam is distributed to process at 450, 150, and 50 psi.
A Brown Boveri double-extraction back-pressure turbine (manufactured in St. Cloud) has also been installed. The unit can generate 20.8 MW at maximum, but the actual generation is dictated by steam usage.
The primary fuel is low-sulfur Kentucky coal, delivered by truck. The coal is unloaded into a concrete lined storage area. Belt conveyors transport the coal to the crusher/transfer house, then to the boiler bunker.
The mill uses and returns (cleaner than the river itself) ten million gallons of water per day. Mill effluent is treated in the primary clarifier for solids removal. An activated sludge aeration basin with secondary clarifier is used for BOD reduction before discharge to the Mississippi River. Sludge from the clarifiers is dewatered on a belt filter press and a screw press. The thickened sludge is mixed with bark and fed to the boiler for incineration.
Automation technology is critical to the operations of the Sartell mill. Many computer based systems work together to account for and to improve the quality of mill products.
Some of them are:
High speed fiber optic cables throughout the mill network these systems to provide a mill-wide system of control.
Sartell is a city in Benton and Stearns Counties in the U.S. state of Minnesota that straddles the Mississippi River. It is part of the St. Cloud Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 19,351 at the 2020 census, making it St. Cloud's most populous suburb and the fourth-largest city in central Minnesota, after St. Cloud, Elk River, and Willmar.
Pulp is a fibrous lignocellulosic material prepared by chemically, semi-chemically or mechanically producing cellulosic fibers from wood, fiber crops, waste paper, or rags. Mixed with water and other chemicals or plant-based additives, pulp is the major raw material used in papermaking and the industrial production of other paper products.
Paper engineering is a branch of engineering that deals with the usage of physical science and life sciences in conjunction with mathematics as applied to the converting of raw materials into useful paper products and co-products. The field applies various principles in process engineering and unit operations to the manufacture of paper, chemicals, energy and related materials. The following timeline shows some of the key steps in the development of the science of chemical and bioprocess engineering:
A paper machine is an industrial machine which is used in the pulp and paper industry to create paper in large quantities at high speed. Modern paper-making machines are based on the principles of the Fourdrinier Machine, which uses a moving woven mesh to create a continuous paper web by filtering out the fibres held in a paper stock and producing a continuously moving wet mat of fibre. This is dried in the machine to produce a strong paper web.
Wastewater treatment is a process which removes and eliminates contaminants from wastewater and converts this into an effluent that can be returned to the water cycle. Once returned to the water cycle, the effluent creates an acceptable impact on the environment or is reused for various purposes. The treatment process takes place in a wastewater treatment plant. There are several kinds of wastewater which are treated at the appropriate type of wastewater treatment plant. For domestic wastewater, the treatment plant is called a Sewage Treatment. For industrial wastewater, treatment either takes place in a separate Industrial wastewater treatment, or in a sewage treatment plant. Further types of wastewater treatment plants include Agricultural wastewater treatment and leachate treatment plants.
The kraft process (also known as kraft pulping or sulfate process) is a process for conversion of wood into wood pulp, which consists of almost pure cellulose fibres, the main component of paper. The kraft process involves treatment of wood chips with a hot mixture of water, sodium hydroxide (NaOH), and sodium sulfide (Na2S), known as white liquor, that breaks the bonds that link lignin, hemicellulose, and cellulose. The technology entails several steps, both mechanical and chemical. It is the dominant method for producing paper. In some situations, the process has been controversial because kraft plants can release odorous products and in some situations produce substantial liquid wastes.
The defibrator is a thermo mechanical pulping refiner in which the pulp material, such as wood chips, is ground in an environment of steam between a rotating grinding disc (rotor) and a stationary disc (stator) each with radial grooves that provides the grinding surface. Wood chips are fed into the centre and are broken down as the centrifugal force pushes them towards the circumference of the discs where the grooves are finer to produce wood fibre. The size of the refined fibres can to some extent be controlled by altering the distance between the discs where a closer distance produces finer fibres but also requires higher grinding force. The capacity per machine is largely determined by the size of the machine, as well as the motor speed 1500 rpm or 1800 rpm.
Industrial wastewater treatment describes the processes used for treating wastewater that is produced by industries as an undesirable by-product. After treatment, the treated industrial wastewater may be reused or released to a sanitary sewer or to a surface water in the environment. Some industrial facilities generate wastewater that can be treated in sewage treatment plants. Most industrial processes, such as petroleum refineries, chemical and petrochemical plants have their own specialized facilities to treat their wastewaters so that the pollutant concentrations in the treated wastewater comply with the regulations regarding disposal of wastewaters into sewers or into rivers, lakes or oceans. This applies to industries that generate wastewater with high concentrations of organic matter, toxic pollutants or nutrients such as ammonia. Some industries install a pre-treatment system to remove some pollutants, and then discharge the partially treated wastewater to the municipal sewer system.
New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) are pollution control standards issued by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The term is used in the Clean Air Act Extension of 1970 (CAA) to refer to air pollution emission standards, and in the Clean Water Act (CWA) referring to standards for water pollution discharges of industrial wastewater to surface waters.
A pulp mill is a manufacturing facility that converts wood chips or other plant fiber sources into a thick fiber board which can be shipped to a paper mill for further processing. Pulp can be manufactured using mechanical, semi-chemical, or fully chemical methods. The finished product may be either bleached or non-bleached, depending on the customer requirements.
Norske Skog Saugbrugs AS is a pulp mill and paper mill located in Halden, Norway, which produces supercalender (SC) magazine paper. Located in the river Tista in Tistedalen, the mill produces 550,000 tonnes per year in three paper machines. Pulp is produced both from virgin fibers at an on-site thermomechanical pulp (TMP) mill. Part of Norske Skog, it is the sole remaining magazine mill in Norway.
Title 40 is a part of the United States Code of Federal Regulations. Title 40 arranges mainly environmental regulations that were promulgated by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), based on the provisions of United States laws. Parts of the regulation may be updated annually on July 1.
Paper is a thin sheet material produced by mechanically or chemically processing cellulose fibres derived from wood, rags, grasses, or other vegetable sources in water, draining the water through a fine mesh leaving the fibre evenly distributed on the surface, followed by pressing and drying. Although paper was originally made in single sheets by hand, almost all is now made on large machines—some making reels 10 metres wide, running at 2,000 metres per minute and up to 600,000 tonnes a year. It is a versatile material with many uses, including printing, painting, graphics, signage, design, packaging, decorating, writing, and cleaning. It may also be used as filter paper, wallpaper, book endpaper, conservation paper, laminated worktops, toilet tissue, currency, and security paper, or in a number of industrial and construction processes.
The Great Lakes Paper Company was the operator of the largest and most modern pulp and paper manufacturing facility in the world. The Company employed over 4,000 in Northern Ontario, starting in 1924 as a pulp mill at Fort William, Ontario. Great Lakes had a highly developed social network within the company, including a children's Christmas party held at a local arena, and an annual picnic held at a local park, as well as many sports teams and other social groups. The company's working environment was enhanced by cultural diversity. For example under the Government of Canada's immigration policy, the "Close Relatives Scheme" resulted in over 400 Ukrainian refugees being employed as workers after World War II.
The environmental effects of paper are significant, which has led to changes in industry and behaviour at both business and personal levels. With the use of modern technology such as the printing press and the highly mechanized harvesting of wood, disposable paper became a relatively cheap commodity, which led to a high level of consumption and waste. The rise in global environmental issues such as air and water pollution, climate change, overflowing landfills and clearcutting have all lead to increased government regulations. There is now a trend towards sustainability in the pulp and paper industry as it moves to reduce clear cutting, water use, greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel consumption and clean up its influence on local water supplies and air pollution.
The Tamil Nadu Newsprint and Papers Limited (TNPL) was established by the Government of Tamil Nadu to produce newsprint and writing paper using bagasse, a sugarcane residue. The Government of Tamil Nadu listed the paper mill in April 1979 under the provisions of the Companies Act of 1956. The factory is situated at Kagithapuram 11.0488°N 77.9977°E in the Karur District of Tamil Nadu and Manapparai, Trichy district of Tamil Nadu. The registered office of the company is located in Guindy, Chennai.
Pan Pac Forest Products Ltd is a forest products company based at Whirinaki, near Napier, New Zealand. The company includes forestry operations, manufacturing and sales of wood pulp and lumber products, employing approximately 360 staff. Originally majority-owned by a New Zealand company and producing mechanical pulp, it is now wholly owned by a Japanese company and producing thermo-mechanical pulp.
A log pond is a small natural lake or reservoir used for storage of wooden logs in readiness for milling at a sawmill. Although some mill ponds served this purpose for water-powered sawmills, steam-powered sawmills used log ponds for transportation of logs near the mill; and did not require the elevation drop of watermill reservoirs.
The Sitka Pulp Mill was a pulp mill located on the North and West Shores of Sawmill Cove, approximately five miles East of Sitka, Alaska. In 1956, the mill site was purchased from Freda and John Van Horn by the Alaska Pulp Corporation. This was the first Japanese investment in the United States of America since World War II, and the mill operated from 1959 until 1993. The majority of production was used to create rayon fabric, and to supply Japan with logs to rebuild homes and infrastructure after World War II. In the later years of the mill, as the demand for rayon and logs for rebuilding decreased, the primary focus of the mill became the manufacture of paper.
Mechanical pulping is the process in which wood is separated or defibrated mechanically into pulp for the paper industry.
45°37′12″N94°12′04″W / 45.6200°N 94.2012°W
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