The forest products industry has evolved steadily in the past and the prospect is that it will continue to develop in a stable way. Its volume has grown at a steady 3%/yr during this century and will continue to do so far into this millennium. The well known cyclicality of the business is not caused by consumers, but is a self imposed phenomenon, which reflects our deficient command of the logistics chain from forest to the market. Technologies - although basically unchanged through more than 150 years - have gone through a dramatic development. The production capacity of today's pulp, paper and board production lines is 10 times larger than 40 years ago. Paper is now a multi-layer, multi-component, extremely thin product that is formed as a 10-m wide sheet at speeds higher than 100 km/hr - or 280 m2/sec. Modern pulp and paper mills have become extremely complex but efficient high tech establishments.
The escalating capital intensity of the industry has forced many companies to merge into large global corporations to be able to carry the financial risk involved in building and starting up new production lines. Many of these new mills are located close to the raw material, where no previous infrastructure was in place. This adds on to complexity since both social and local environmental aspects have to be considered.
A task for the future
Economies of scale are not the only path to profitability. There are many examples of successful medium size private companies. Their secret lies in a profound understanding of the business, a close relationship with their customers, a streamlined organization and a good understanding of their technological possibilities. Our task for the future is to develop and build structurally simple but efficient facilities, which meet all stakeholders needs.
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| | | % |
| Fuel wood | 1,838 | 55.2 |
| Industrial | 1,494 | 44.8 |
| Mechanical | 921 | 27.6 |
| Pulp, paper and board | 573 | 17.2 |
| Total | 3,332 | 100 |
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The global use of wood exceeds 3,300 million m3/yr, Table 1. More than half of this is burnt as firewood and charcoal or wasted in slash and burn cultivation. Forty five percent - or roughly 1,500 million m3/yr - is used industrially. Only 17% is used directly as a raw material for the pulp and paper industry. A majority of the industrial timber is extracted from sustainably managed boreal forests, which grow faster than the current drain, or from tree plantations. A minor portion comes from natural tropical forests, which are clear cut to provide land for tree plantations.
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| | |
| Chemical Pulp | ~135 million tonnes |
| Mechanical pulp | ~ 45 million tonnes |
| Recycled fibers | ~120 million tonnes |
| Total | ~300 million tonnes |
| This needs wood | ~330 million tonnes |
| The degree of recirculation is | ~40% |
|
Boreal forests grow slowly. The cycle time is 50 to100 years depending on climate and soil conditions. Tree plantations in tropical or subtropical areas grow up to 10 times faster. If all the industrial timber currently used were produced in subtropical tree plantations, one would need only 30 million ha of suitable land. This is one and a half times the forest land of Finland. Efficient tree farming is a realistic option to provide low cost and high quality raw material for the industry. It is also perhaps the only option to safeguard the world's forests. By allowing intensive tree farming in carefully selected areas one can leave most of the original forest intact. Well managed boreal forests can be used in a sustainable way as the Scandinavian example well demonstrates.
Another important raw material source for paper and board making is recycled paper. It represents roughly 40% of the industry's fiber base. The remaining 60% is derived from virgin fiber or agricultural residues. Some recycling and deinking practices are environmentally questionable. They produce new and harmful waste streams and they need lots of energy. Recycling of used paper and board products and their reprocessing can be justified only if it can be done economically and with a lower environmental load than current chemical and mechanical pulping of wood. Many deinking systems in use today do not meet these criteria.
The fuel value of waste paper is high. It can be safely and efficiently burned to produce steam and power in modern power stations. The consumption of paper is concentrated in population centers where energy use is also high. The use of waste paper for energy is thus a very interesting proposition. It has been shown that if 80% of the waste paper that is now dumped was converted into energy, one could generate an amount of power that equals the current use of external energy. The industry would thus become independent of external energy sources. A remaining environmental problem here is the high ash content of current papers. This will be solved in the future by using organic fillers manufactured from renewable raw materials.
A pulp mill of the 1960s covered 33% of its energy demand with fossil fuels. Today's best chemical bleached pulp mills produce substantially more energy out of their own wastes than they need for processing. This excess is likely to increase essentially, as new spent liquor and solid waste gasification techniques evolve.
Mechanical pulping is very energy intensive. The specific power demand has increased from 1 MWh/tonne to 3 MWh/tonne during the last 30 years. New thermomechanical pulping (TMP) methods produce high quality fibers, which allow the replacement of chemical pulp in many demanding printing paper grades. Wood is saved at the cost of increased energy input. The choice of pulping method is essentially governed by fiber quality and the cost relations and availability of wood and energy.
Multi layer sheet forming, long nip pressing, on line coating and calendering are all techniques prone to increase paper and board machine energy demand. Other new technologies have compensated this to the extent that the energy needs of paper machines have stayed constant over decades despite increased complexity. In the not too distant future, new forming, pressing and drying techniques will substantially reduce the net energy input.
The forest products industry has quickly adopted new electronic control tools. In fact it would not have developed this far without them. One comparison claims that a single paper machine contains more electronic components than a modern passenger jetliner.
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| Paper fiber demand | Million tonnes/yr |
| Recycled and DIP | 120 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Chemical pulp | 135 | 225 | 135 | 300 |
| TMP and CTMP | 45 | 75 | 165 | 0 |
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| Total | 300 | 300 | 300 | 300 |
| Wood | 331 | 551 | 457 | 630 |
| Electrical energy demand | TWh/a | TWh/a | TWh/a | TWh/ |
| Recycled and DIP | 36 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Chemical pulp | -41 | -68 | -41 | -90 |
| TMP an CTMP | 99 | 165 | 363 | 0 |
| Paper and board | 150 | 150 | 150 | 150 |
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| Total demand | 245 | 248 | 472 | 60 |
| El. generation from waste incineration | 230 | 384 | 384 | 384 |
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| Excess/deficit(-) | -15 | 136 | -88 | 324 |
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Dramatic environmental improvements
The forest products industry has dramatically improved its environmental performance. Scandinavia and Finland lead the development. The absolute release of oxygen consuming substances (biological and chemical) as well as organochlorine substances in liquid effluent have in Finland been reduced to only a few percent of the levels of mid 1970s regardless of doubled paper and board production (Fig. 1). The same is true with regard to releases of acid rain components to the atmosphere. If the fuel potential of waste paper is accounted for, one can claim that the forest products industry does not contribute to the release of greenhouse gases, since releases originate from renewable raw materials and are reabsorbed by growing biomass.
By no means all of the world's pulp and paper mills have reached the economic efficiency and environmental performance of the industry in the Nordic region. There is a lot of retrofitting and modernization work to do before the global forest products industry can - as a whole - claim environmental excellence. Some facilities are outdated to the extent that refitting is beyond economic feasibility. They have to be shutdown or completely rebuilt. Some new technological developments, which would further improve both environmental and energy efficiencies have not yet reached the status of proven technology. We must push hard to make these technological advances available to the industry.
The rapid development of the electronic media sets new quality standards for paper and board products. The "paperless office" concept did not materialize; on the contrary, it escalated the demand for new high quality papers for electronic printers and copiers. The print quality and the output of magazines and advertisements are developing rapidly as are the uses and format of paper and board based packaging materials. It is interesting to note that the electronics component industry sees the paper and board industry as well as the graphic arts industry as potential paths toward the manufacture of inexpensive electronic components. Electronic labeling is already here.
The Internet will not replace but increase written and oral communication. Electronic letter writing or "chatting" between people who share interests and hobbies has become popular. It has made person-to-person communication faster and easier and it has also made important databanks available to everyone. Electronic speed boosts information flow but it does not take the place of print media. Both will develop in parallel. One should also remember that printing and writing paper, including newsprint, accounts for less than half the total paper and board used.
Use of paper is unevenly distributed around the world. It is related to the level of socioeconomic development. The average North American uses more than 300 kg/yr per capita, the average West European more than 200 kg/yr and the Chinese less than 30 kg/yr per capita. Paper production has to double if people in East and Southeast Asia are to use paper as people do now in the EU. Wood from current world forests will not suffice as raw material for such an expansion. China and some Southeast Asian countries do not have sufficient wood raw material or lack suitable land for tree farming to supply their populations with paper and board products. Their dominant raw materials are mainly agricultural wastes like straw and reed.
Time to step up
Thousands of small mills produce roughly 20 million tonnes/yr of pulp from agricultural waste in an extremely polluting way. The mills are too small to economically support advanced chemical recovery systems and effluent treatment facilities. The logistics of transporting and storing raw materials based on seasonally harvested crops do not allow large scale pulp manufacturing. Annual plants are high in inorganic salt content. The high silica content in particular makes closed loop liquor cycling and chemicals regeneration very difficult. New technologies have to be developed, which allow economic small scale processing without serious pollution. Scientific research has already produced several options, which would allow this. It is now time for those involved in process development and equipment manufacturing to take on the challenge to solve this gargantuan problem. We must provide the rapidly developing regions in the world with low cost small scale "package" mill systems based on serial production. It is amazing that no one has attempted this yet, particularly when one considers that the raw material base from agricultural leftovers is several times larger than the current global use of wood and that the fiber quality potential of many annual plants by far exceed those of wood.
To meet these challenges requires wisdom at all levels. Industrial and business leaders need support from skilled and dependable people in their own organizations as well as equipment, chemicals and systems suppliers. Expertise in management of forestry, in material flow logistics and engineering, in project management and implementation of plant construction as well as environmental excellence are rarely available within pulp and paper companies themselves. These services are partly provided by experienced expert organizations.
Johan Gullichsen is Professor Emeritus at Helsinki University of Technology. This is an edited version of the talk that Prof. Gullichsen presented at the opening of the Huber R&D Center in Hamina, Finland, earlier this year.
