Things That Bother Me About the Disposal
of Wastes from the Paper Industry
Harold C. Koch
Research Chemist, Aetna Paper Co.
Division of Howard Paper Mills, Inc.
Dayton, Ohio
This paper will be limited to a discussion of the things that have
bothered the writer while working to reduce the wastes of paper mills
of the type most commonly found in this district; that is, mills which
start with prepared pulps and waste papers and convert these into
finished products.
An investigator working in the laboratory remarked one day that
he expected the papers and particularly paperboards of the future to be
made without water. A well-known publisher and executive in the
paper field once said that he would not be surprised to see paper become
a by-product of a new industry utilizing all the constituents of natural
woods. At present there are fascinating daydreams which, if they were
to become a reality, would quickly eliminate two of the most troublesome waste problems of the paper industry. The large volume of water
used in paper making certainly becomes the number-one problem in
waste disposal, and the large amount of material in very dilute solution
and suspension in this water becomes the second problem. If there
were no water or much less water to dispose of, and if the materials now
considered waste were raw materials for valuable products, there would
be no waste-disposal problems, at least not those known today.
The first step in reducing paper-mill waste is to reduce the volume
of water; in most of the paper mills represented in this vicinity, that
is accomplished by recirculation and reuse of white waters. That is,
the waters removed from the paper stock at the paper machines, as the
sheet is being formed, are collected and pumped back to be reused in
filling beaters and in diluting more stock before it is pumped to the
paper machines. All machines recirculate a large part of the water as an
integral part of their operation. When more than this normal portion
of the water is reused at various points in the process, such as a dilutant
in the stock system and to replace fresh water in showers and the like,
the procedure is called closing the system.
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