When the opportunity to travel to Germany to visit a paper mill and see how paper is made arose, I was more than happy to – the chance to learn more about how the material we use every day for our clients’ work was something I wasn’t about to miss out on.
For many, paper is just something that brochures and magazines are printed onto, but there is so much more it, and it can often give a massive indication as to the quality of the item that it is selling, just from the look and feel of the surface of the paper.
So, after a 4am start, and the early morning flight from London into Munich we were picked up by Tony and the driver. We were then driven across Bavaria at break-neck speed down the autobahn to the Myllykoski paper mill in Plattling, on the edge of the mountains and forest.
On arrival to the mill, the scale of the site was the first thing that struck me – there aren’t many places I have been with 2 train tracks coming into their business premises!
After seeing some of the 2000m3 of logs used each day being precisely trimmed into 0.5m pieces and then stripped of bark, then promptly ground under extreme pressure to produce the pulp, we went to see the largest machine I have ever seen – these paper machines make web-offset presses seem small (in fact it is the second biggest paper machine in Europe)!
After the pulp is added to the wire it is then pressed under 800 tonnes of pressure and heated under steam to dry the paper out and then rolled to smooth it out. The pictures can explain this in more detail, rather than me trying to simplify the process to get it into words.
The sheer scale of the factory and the amount of power, pressure, steam, wood, water is used to produce something that we all take for granted in our every day life, allowed me to see why paper was so expensive to buy. European forests are very well managed, and almost all the wood used is from forests that are farmed and replaced when tress are felled. The most interesting thing that I found was that despite all the water used, the mill actually feeds back the same amount of water into the river that it takes out – so none is wasted!
After 4 hours of being shown the interesting method of producing paper, and learning the difference between how gloss, silk and matt paper are produced we left the factory, and headed out into Munich for some fantastic Bavarian food, and of course, plenty of beer and schnapps!
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