THE PAPER FAMINE.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXVI, Issue 18018, 5 November 1920, Page 2

THE PAPER FAMINE.

® MEGASS FOR PULP. NOW BURNT AS FUEL. (By T. D. GHATAWAY in the Melbourne Argus.) Many years ago a newspaper called the “Sugar Bowl” was regularly printed on paper made from megass, or begass, the fibrous remnant of the sugarcane after crushing and was published in New Orleans, the chief city of Louisiana, U.S.A. Eventually it used wood pulp paper, because the latter was clftaper, and megass, as a fuel, had become necessary to the sugar manufacturers. To-day the position has entirely changed. The price of wood pulp paper has risen far beyond anything in the memory of the present generation, and even if it tell 50 per cent, w’ould still be about four limes as expensive as it was just before the war. In explanation a statement was made to the printing and allied trades in London last April, in which the following reasons were given for the increased cost: Wages in the paper trade had increased 300 per cent.; rags, cost of, had increased 300 per cent.; pulp, cost of, had increased nearly 300 per cent.; coal, up to three tons being required to make a ton of paper, increased 250 per cent. It is clear from this that there is no great likelihood of paper falling in price to any considerable extent until greater supplies of pulp or other raw material bring down the initial and all-important item from which cheap paper is derived. Mr. Shakespeare, secretary of the New South Wales Country Press Association, in Brisbane the other day expressed the belief that by September, 1921, the supply of paper would once again equal the demand, but in the face of the above increases it cannot be expected that the price will fall to pre-war rates. In Australia in June, 1915, the value of “news” was, in bulk, 2d. per lb., or £lB 13s 4d per ton; in July of this year the quotation was lOijd. per lb., or about £lOO per ton. Even last March the price was £7O per ton, or about six times the pre-war rates. This is not peculiar to Australia. The shertage is world-wide. In every country the smaller newspapers are ceasing publication, while the cost of publishing books has become well night prohibitive, except in the case of established writers. OIL FOR FUEL. Not only in Australia, but in the sugarcane growing countries of the world, it would seem that there is a permanent and possibly increasing supply of raw material for papermaking in megass, provided it can be shown that it would be more profitable to the" manufacturers to substitute some other fuel for it. This is, of course, no new Idea; but the prospect of permanently high prices of printing paper introduces a new factor, and therefore gives the idea a new value. ' For the purpose of my argument I will confine myself to the Australian cane sugar industry. Roughly every 100 tons of cane contains 10 tons of fibre, or in an .average season in the Australian sugar industry there remain after the sugar juice has been extracted something between 250,000 and 300,000 tons of fibre. The weight of the megass is, of course, greater, as therex, is moisture, etc., in it. That immense amount of fibre goes direct to the furnaces, and we know that practically the whole of it is burnt. According to the United States Bureau of Chemistry, megass will yield 35 per cent, of its weight in paper. Therefore each year we burn the raw' material which could make from 80,000 to 100,000 tons of paper. When paper was £l3 to £l4 per ton the loss was, of course, immense, but the mills could not have done away with this fuel. The timber supplies were even then running out, and coal was practically out of the question. Today, with paper at over eight times the value, the sugar industry might well consider' whether it could not profitably substitute some other fuel for the megass. One’s thoughts naturally turn to the possibilities of oil as a substitute. The recent agreement with the Anglo-Persi.an Company, the encouragement of exploration in Australia for subterranean oils, the excellent prospects of oil developments in New Guinea and Papua, the improvements in the methods of using oil 1 and fi alcohol fuels, and the fact that the sugar mills themselves waste or burn millions of gallons of molasses annually, all point to the possibility that in the not far-distant future it will be found more profitable to use oil as fuel, and to sell the megass—either dumped in bales or pulped on the spot—to the manufacturers of paper. According to the American estimate made Tn 1909, the cost of megass and wood to make a ton of paper varies by a mere fraction. and consequently of the cost of wood has gone up 300 per cent, so also has the value of megass for paper-making. On the American basis the megass in 1909 wag. worth £1 per ton, or roughly 2/-and over per ton of cane. Even in April last it was logically worth 6/- per ton of cane ,or £3 per ton of sugar—a very considerable item. In the early days of the Queensland co-operative mills, particulars of the costs of which were published, the cost of fuel was about 10/- per ton of sugar. Naturally this did not include the megass, the actual fuel value of which does not seem to have ever been taken into the accounts. The megass was, apparently, a waste product, and the accounts of the mill companies never gave it a line, though the firewood item was recorded with “meticulous particularity.” The Interstate Commission elicited evidence showing that only when a regular supply of cane came into the mills was the megass sufficient for all fuel purposes. At other tim& it had to be supconsumption of megass, under the plemented by firew’ood or coal. This is important, as showing that the consumption of megass, under the best organised conditions, was, to the production of sugar, practically as

ton to ton. The slight discrepancy in taking these round figures is not material. EXPERIMENTS. What sugar manufacturers will ask themselves is, whether megass at £3 per ton (actually more valuable when quoted in terms of fibre) for paper-making is worth more as a fuel; and whether oil could be more profitably employed to do the work now accomplished by megass, firewood, coal, molasses, and some other waste products of the sugar mill. There is not a great deal of information at present on this point. Newlands, in their standard work “Sugar, a Handbook for Planters and Refiners” (latest edition, 1909), tells us that experiments in the Hawaiian Islands, by Mr. E. P. Jones, show that oil will effect five to six times the evaporation secured by megass. The Hawaiian sugar industry is probably the most scientific in the world, and these figures must be given full credence. Thus w e get down to the point that a ton of oil will do as I much work as at least five tons of I megass, and the latter for papermaking was worth last April at least £3 per ton. Since then paper has risen in price, but it remains a question, now being duscussed in the United States, whether the true value of paper pulp has risen in consequence. In 1914 the market price of fuel oil in Australia (as stated by the Prime Minister in Parliament) was £5/5/- per ton; last May it. had risen to £9/10/- per ton. Clearly, if it can do, ton for ton, five times the work of megass, it has a long way to go before it can reach the paper value of the megass, the work of which it can do so efficiently. There is probably no fuel more costly to transport than coal. The delivering of oil.to th e sugar mills need cause little anxiety. Most of the mills are situated sufficiently near the coast line to enable them to be supplied by gravitation from coastal reservoirs. In the United States oil is conveyed by pipes, not 10 or 50 miles, but hundreds, and even, I believe, thousands of miles. In pre-war days the cost of fuel in German and French beet factories, where the process of diffusion calls for a greater head of steam for evapsugar made. (Newlands, 1909, p. 405, op. cit.) Assuming the cane sugar mills in Australia did no worse work, and succeeded in making the megass do all the evaporation, then, as a ton of megass ' is burnt to each ton of sugar made, the fuel cost was 30/- to the manufacturer. But I have already shown that it is worth £3 to the paper-maker. In actual practice the Australian sugar manufacturer uses some firewood, coal, or refuse to add to his megass fuel. Therefore the actual value he obtains from his megass is less than 30/- probably 25/- for megass, and 5/- for other fuels. POSSIBLE RESULTS. All these points, however, can' be properly elucidated if the Commonwealth Government moves to have them cleared up. The Government is interested—deeply interested—-not only as a matter of general policy, but also in particular as a shareholder in the great sugar industry. If oil will do five times the work of megass, it should be worth five times the value of mqgass. As fuel on the European basis megass is worth, apparently, 25/- per ton; on its capacity to produce paper, based on the Washington Bureau of Chemistry’s figures, it is worth £3 per ton. Assuming that in Australia we make, in a reasonable season, 300,000 tons of sugar, then it would seem that we are burning £900,000 of paper material to do work which oil, even at £lO per ton, could do for one-fifth that cost. I estimate that 60,000 tons of fuel oil would do th e work of the sugar mills of New South Wales and Queensland. At £lO per ton this would, as against the waste of megass, save £300,000 a year, and we should still have in hand the megass out of which we could manufacture at least 100,000 tons of paper.