Plastic in wood-chips export

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34046, 9 January 1976, Page 1

Plastic in wood-chips export

(From Our Own Reporter) NELSON, Jan. 8. A Nelson forestry firm today began the huge task of sieving a stockpile of 32,000 tonnes of wood chips destined for Japan, to extract minute particles of a polypropolene string. The job is expected to take about three months, and. according to Mr T. G. Todd,

the secretary of the firm, Baigent and Company, Ltd, it will be very expensive. The sieving of the wood chips, which will be pulped in Japan, was made necessary by the presence of plastic string used to tie up waste slabs sent to the company’s chippers. The string was not removed before the wood was chipped and small pieces of the plastic material —about five parts per million —are now part of the woodpile. The men working on the job now have to race against

time. While the machinery was undergoing repairs this afternoon, the chip ship Nelson Maru arrived in Nelson.

She will be in port for 60 hours, during which Baigent and Company hopes to process about 3000 tonnes (enough for one hold) to send to Japan as an experimental shipment.

The equipment being used —some of it borrowed, some of it made by the firm’s employees—can process 50 tons an hour. It will be worked around the clock.

Mr Todd today praised the co-operation of various Nelson business firms in the task. Some worked throughout the Christmas holiday period so that the machinery would be ready, he said. Baigent and Company is the biggest privately-owned forestry concern in the southern hemisphere. The plastic, upon heating with the wood chips during the pulping process, adulterates the pulp. This was discovered when some of the string caused

damage in the pulping process in Japan, said Mr Todd. By the time it was discovered, thousands of tonnes of chips had been trucked and deposited at Port Nelson beside the stockpile from Nelson Pine Forests.

Unlike Nelson Pine Forests, Baigent and Company makes chips from only a very small proportion of logs—those which are unsuitable for milling. The remainder of the firm’s chips come from the recoverv of slab wood from the mills. This used to be 'burned as waste.