25 Random things about pulp and paper

By Justin Toland, Editor, PPI magazine
BRUSSELS, Feb. 10, 2009 - THOSE OF YOU who are members of the social networking website Facebook may have received a message from a friend recently detailing '25 random things' about that person. The objective of the exercise is to send a list of random things - some trivial, some profound - to 25 of your friends, each of whom is encouraged to write his or her own list and send it to 25 friends, with the proviso that one of the recipients should be the person who sent them the list in the first place.

This set me thinking, what would I say if I had to write 25 random things about pulp and paper? Here's what I came up with:

1. Cai Lun invented paper in 105 AD in China.

2. The main grade of paper used for Origami, the traditional Japanese art of paper folding, is called Washi. It is commonly made using fibers from the bark of the gampi tree, the mitsumata shrub (Edgeworthia papyrifera), or the paper mulberry, but also can be made using bamboo, hemp, rice, and wheat.

3. Japanese scientists are planning to release a flotilla of paper planes from the International Space Station in 2009 to test if they can survive re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere.

4. The Fourdrinier brothers spent more than £60,000 developing their continuous papermaking machine. That is equivalent to $5 billion in today's money. Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier were declared bankrupt in 1810.

5. Stora Enso is the world's oldest limited company that has operated without interruption since it was founded. Stora Kopparberg's mines in Falun, Sweden, were first mentioned in documentary sources in 1288.

6. International Paper directly employs more people than Burger King.

7. Germany is the largest paper producer in Europe, followed by Finland, Sweden, Italy and France.

8. 1993 was the first year more paper in the US was recycled than went to landfill. In 2007, the recovery rate for the country was 56%.

9. Benjamin Franklin was the first paper merchant in the US. One of his many quotations is: "An investment in knowledge pays the best interest." A wise man.

10. The Nokia Corporation started life as a woodpulp mill, established by Knut Fredrik Idestam in Tampere in 1865. It was the first mechanical pulp mill in Finland.

11. Aracruz Celulose started up its first mill in September 1978. Today the company is capable of producing more than 3.2 million tonnes/yr of bleached eucalyptus pulp.

12. When blues legend Muddy Waters moved to Chicago, he got a job in a paper mill to pay the bills.

13. The founding assembly of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) took place in Toronto in October 1993. As of April 2008, more than 100 million ha of forest in 79 countries was certified to FSC standards.

14. The first Bible printed on FSC-certified stock was published in November 2007. Domtar supplied the paper.

15. The Program for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes (PEFC) was founded in Paris in June 1999. There are more than 200 million ha of PEFC certified forests in 35 countries.

16. Dissolving pulp is sold in either bales or reels. Most European customers want bales and most US customers want reels. The rest of the world goes for a mix of the two. Sappi Saiccor mill in South Africa is the world's largest dissolving pulp facility.

17. To circumnavigate the globe with paper at the equator, you would need to lay 134,936,027 sheets of A4 end-to-end.

18. The Paper Industry International Hall of Fame is located at the Paper Discovery Center in Appleton, Wis., US. To date, 89 men and women have been inducted into the hall of fame.

19. Mondi Richards Bay is the largest mill in Africa. It produces 720,000 tonnes/yr of pulp and 280,000 tonnes/yr of linerboard.

20. Ten years ago, Carter Holt Harvey Mataura in New Zealand was the world's southernmost mill and Stora Enso Kemijärvi in Finland was the northernmost. Both are now closed.

21. Kimberly-Clark launched the first facial tissue in 1924. The material Kleenex was made from was originally known as 'Cellucotton'.

22. German chemist Carl F. Dahl invented the kraft pulping process in 1879.

23. A typical pulp bleaching sequence from the 1950s was C-E-H-E-H.

24. The first paper mill I visited was Sappi Nijmegen in the Netherlands. The most recent mill I visited was Sofidel Intertissue in the UK.

25. Print out this article and mail it to a friend.

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