NEWSPRINT.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 63, Issue 310, 11 October 1943, Page 6

NEWSPRINT.

PROCESS OF MANUFACTURE. SPECIALISED INDUSTRY. The views expressed in the accompanying article are generally endorsed by those engaged in the newspaper industry of the Dominion. There has been during the last three or four years a considerable amount of discussion regarding the use of the exotic timbers that have been raised in New Zealand during the past 50 years, but mainly within the last 30. The acreage of both Government and commercial plantations is in the vicinity of 552,196 acres. The indigenous forests of the countfy have largely disappeared from the North Island, but there remains in the South 'lsland a considerable area of millable timber, much of which is inaccessible for the time being. The uses of timber are noc generally understood. They are enormously varied. The intention of this article is to draw attention to one that has been tentatively put forward as a possibility. It is the manufacture of newsprint. To view a suggestion of this sort it is necessary to examine what the production of this commodity entails. The amount of forest lands held by newsprint manufacturers in North America —United States and Canada.—-is over one hundred million acres. The total area of this country is 60-million acres. And yet newsprint requires only four per cent, of the timber utilised in America. Let us look at what the manufacture of newsprint in America involves. The position of mills is dependent in all cases on three factors. The first is accessibility of supplies of logs by water flotation and the shipment of the completed product by deep-sea ships that can berth close to the mills. The second is the provision of electricity at a very cheap rate. The site of most mills is fixed by the fact that they can generate their own hydro-electric power at a fraction of the rate required by a public or commercial installation. The third is that there shall be an abundant supply of pure water. By this is meant water that is devoid of any mineral content that may affect the colour of the product, or prove injurious to the vastly complicated machinery. For when pulp pours on to a newspaper machine it is 199 parts water and one part the cellulose from timber that comes out at the end of the machine, at 1000 ft per minute, in the sheet on which you read your newspaper. » Essentials to Manufacture. Let us look at these things in the order above. Timber is cut in the winter by seasonable labour that may have been employed in harvesting in the summer and autumn. In almost all cases it is brought to water by various methods, where the freshes that the melting snow create carry it down to rivers where it can be assembled into rafts and floated to the mill.

The reason for cheap electricity is fundamental. Taking all operations together a newsprint paper mill must provide upwards of 100 h.p. per ton of daily capacity. If the steam required for cooking sulphite pulp, and heating the drying cylinders on the paper-making machine is also generated electrically, a total of about 300 h.p. per ton of capacity may be required. Mills are being operated in America to-day without so much as one fuel burning furnace. Where in New Zealand could we get, let alone pay for, 300 electric horse power for one ton of paper? Then as to water. Taking all the mill operations together, as much as 350 tons of water may be put into wood, and taken out again, for every ton of paper made, while also to give an abundant supply of water as the conveying medium in the mill, a total pumping capacity as high as 2500 tons of water per ton of paper capacity has been provided in some up-to-date operations. This water requires to be chemically pure. In a case outside America where a determined effort was made to establish newsprint manufacture, after the machinery had been installed, it was found that the paper had a purple tint. Chemists eventually discovered that the cause was the steel rollers, and at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds stainless steel had to be substituted The newsprint business is based upon constant chemical research, and so great is the overhead that, whereas it was considered that a mill was not economical unless its output was 100,000 tons per year, this figure has been lifted to about 200,000 tons. The amount of capital employed in a mill is about £50,000 for each individual employed. Difficulties of Establishment. Having established the site and spent a year or so on the preparation of the blueprints it takes in America about two and a half years before the first ton of newsprint comes off the machines. In this country the time would be conservatively five years.

Newsprint consists of ground pulp and sulphite pulp. The former is the timber clear of its bark ground to its fibre, the latter is the same timber cut into chips and treated with sulphur and lime, the product being pure cellulose. The cost of a sulphite plant is double that of the ground pulp mill. In America under the United States Tariff Act of 1922 standard newsprint consists of not less than 70 per cent, of groundwood, and the remainder of unbleached sulphite pulp. In practice, sulphite pulp represents about 20 per cent, of the whole. Every class of wood presents its problems. Australia has been 15 years establishing the industry, not

on economic lines by any means, but

[it has been in wartime a useful adjunct to supply. No attempt has been made up to the present to produce' sulphite pulp, and some millions of pounds will require to be spent to make the industry an economic possibility. Australia normally requires 175,000 tons of newsprint, New Zealand about 25,000, and yet it is very doubtful whether the Australian industry, though the demand approaches the accepted American economic standard of a single mill’s production, could survive without either a substantial tariff or a State subsidy. And if we accept the use of timber on the American basis a heavy burden is to be placed on the newspaper industry, which in effect is the public, to provide 4 per cent, of the forest products of the country. New Zealand from the lay point of view is lacking in the main essentials that in America govern the establishment of a mill. Such timber as there is could not be rafted to a mill based on deep water, and as there is no surplus electricity a special installation would be required. Experience so far has shown that there is no source of hydro-electricity to be cheaply developed. It would seem that, on whatever scale, a newsprint industry in this country could only operate as a serious burden oh the community. There are obviously much better ways of utilising the country’s strictly limited lumber resources.