Road Trip Report

Saturday-Sunday, November 9-10, 2024

Road Trip Report

At 7:45 a.m. on Tuesday, I headed out with Son F (15) and Daughter D (12) for a science team visit to the Domtar paper factory near Bennettsville, SC.  This was about an hour and a half drive for us, east down US74 to Wadesville, south on US52 through quaint Morven and historic Cheraw, east again, across the Great Pee Dee River, and then south down the river to the factory.  It was a very nice drive, not too much bickering between the youth.  Not far from our destination, a sign pointed off northeast toward Hamlet, NC, where my spiritual director Steve and jazz great John Coltrane were from.  I would have liked to visit after our other events, but we had to be back to Charlotte by 3:30 p.m. for D’s art class.  Another time.

Hamlet, North Carolina, homepage

From start to finish, everyone at the Domtar facility was incredibly pleasant.  Environmentalism can be really negative about factories of all kinds, but those in the wood products industry get a double whammy: you’re killing trees, and you’re evil polluters.  When people are open-minded and want to learn actual facts about an industry, the red carpet is rolled out.  Our hosts were three women, two of them engineers and one from HR/Training.  The first activity was some videos about the company and about the paper manufacturing process.

Like many other companies, they are into sustainability both because the regulatory and social climate demands it and because using resources wisely is economically smart. In order for the end products to be certified by forest stewardship associations such as the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, the company has to work with loggers and forest managers to track the source and harvesting practices for all the wood they buy. This creates jobs for people to go out in the woods and keep an eye on how things are done … but not very many, said the HR lady, because once someone gets a forestry job, they stay in it until they die because they love going out in the woods.

Next, the HR lady talked to us about the business.  This is important for us because all our students will need jobs someday, but also because the high school state competition includes a “consulting” project where the teams have to do plans for a business, farm, non-profit group, or other organization with a variety of issues.  Domtar’s starting wage at this plant is over $23 per hour, from the day you walk in the door to fill out tax forms.  After 6 months, when a plant operation employee is trained to position, it goes up to $25+ per hour.  After that, there are wage increases each time an employee develops competence in a new function, about every 18 months if the employee is very diligent.  Their turnover is low.

After this, one of the engineers took us on a bus tour of the whole facility.  There are many steps ahead of the actual paper manufacturing part.  Logs come in on trucks — up to 150 per day — and are lifted off the trucks by an immense grabbing-claw on a crane.  Then they’re made into chips by a giant chipper.  Sometimes truckloads of chips come in.  These chips are dumped onto conveyers by an enormous hydraulic lift that tips the whole truck up on its back end.

The chips sit in huge piles – one of pine chips, one of hardwood – until they’re needed. Then they go into digesters which use alkaline chemicals to break down the cellulose into pulp, and then into bleachers to make it all white.  This plant makes only white paper.  Energy for all of this comes from a biomass generator that burns waste from the processes, such as chips that are too small, as well as organic sludge from the water reclamation system.  It’s called a “hog boiler” throughout the paper industry.

One of the chemicals in the process is lime, which they collect with all the wastes from the digesting and bleaching process and re-burn in a long, cylindrical lime kiln.  By doing this, they have to add only about 5% new lime to each process batch.  When the pulp is all white and the correct consistency, it goes to the actual paper-making line, which is about 200 yards long.

The large rolls at the end are the final step at this plant.  To be turned into consumer products, such as printer paper reams, they go to other plants. We got to walk through the whole line and get right there by the big machine to see the sheet of paper’s development.

Carbon dioxide is a byproduct of the digestion process. It is piped off to a sub-plant run by a contractor and turned into … I don’t remember what.  Water for all the processes is taken from the Great Pee Dee River, used, treated, and returned to the river cleaner than when it came out.  The facility is about 500 acres, and it provides significant wildlife habitat, including for alligators, which the students were disappointed we didn’t see.  The engineer lady said it was because it was a warm day: the alligators like to gather at the wastewater ponds when the river is colder.

Both the engineers had chemical engineering degrees with a concentration in the paper industry.  This program is available at NC State, Clemson, and some other Southern universities.  Both of them had interned with Domtar before making the decision to specialize in the industry.

After the tours, they gave us Chick-fil-A boxed lunches, which are always popular with children.  The guard at the gate was just as pleasant on the way out as she had been when we arrived, and the drive back was just as peaceful as the drive there.