Industrial Engineering - Tissue Paper Industry - Essay Example

China, which has shown tremendous growth in tissue paper consumption in recent years, is one of the influential forces in the global growth in demand (Sen 2008, pg. 22). Apart from China, RISI’s forecasts indicate that there will be strong growth in relative terms in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the Near East. The growth in volume will be upwards of 16 million tons within the forecast period, which equals 1.5 million tons annually. China will be responsible for approximately 42% of the growth, followed by Latin America (15%), then Western Europe (around 12%). China is therefore expected to become the biggest market for tissue paper in the forecast period.

Manufacturing Process

1. Trees arrive at the mill and then they are debarked. Debarking removes the outer layer of the tree and leaves as much wood on it as possible.
2. The debarked logs are chipped into standard size roughly 1 in x ¼ in. The small pieces make it very easy to pulp the wood.
3. The batch of wood chips, which can be around 50 tons, is then combined with 10,000 gallons of cooking agents; the resultant slurry is taken to a 60-ft-tall pressure cooker known as a digester.
4. During cooking, which can take up to hours, most of the moisture in the wood is evaporated (wood chips have around 50% moisture). The mixture is then reduced to around 25 tons of lignin, cellulose fibers (which hold the wood fibers together), and other substances. Out of this, roughly 15 tons of usable fiber, referred to as pulp, are products of the cooked batch.
5. The pulp is taken through a multistage washer system which extracts most of the cooking chemicals and lignin. This fluid, known as black liquor, is separated from the pulp, which is taken to the next phase of production.
6. The washed pulp is taken to the bleach plant where a multistage chemical procedure extracts color from the fiber. Residual lignin, the adhesive that holds the fibers together, will turn the paper yellow over time and must therefore be bleached to make the paperwhite.
7. The pulp is again mixed with water to produce paper stock, which is 99.5% water and 0.5% fiber. The paper stock is sprayed with agents between mobile mesh screens, which allow most of the water to drain. This results in matted fiber which is 18-ft wide. The matted fiber is produced at a frequency of up to 6,500 ft per minute.
8. The mat is then taken to a huge heated cylinder called a Yankee Dryer that dries and presses the paper to a final moisture content of around 5%.\
9. The paper is creped, a procedure that makes it very soft and gives it a somewhat wrinkled appearance. During the process, the paper is scraped off the Dryer using a metal blade. This makes the paper sheets slightly flexible but reduces their thickness and strength so that they virtually crumble when wet. The paper, which is produced at speeds upwards of a mile a minute, is then rolled on jumbo reels that weigh almost 5 tons.
10. The paper is loaded onto converting machines that unroll, slit, and re-roll it on a long thin cardboard tubing, forming a paper log. The paper logs are cut into rolls and wrapped packages.

Raw Materials

Toilet paper is usually made from “virgin” paper, using a mixture of hardwood and softwood trees. Softwood trees have long fibers that wrap around each other; this lends the paper strength. Hardwood trees have shorter fibers that make paper softer. Toilet paper is often a mixture of roughly 30% softwood and 70% hardwood. Other raw materials include chemical agents which break down the trees into usable fiber, water, and bleaches. Firms that make paper from recycled products use ozone, oxygen, sodium hydroxide, or peroxide, to bleach the paper. Virgin-paper manufacturers, on the other hand, generally use chlorine-based bleaches (chlorine dioxide), which have been cited as a threat to the environment.

Conclusion

            The global tissue industry/market will inevitably grow in the foreseeable future (the next 10 years). The industry is typically one that does not face the threat of substitution because people who use tissue paper have to use it whether they like it or not. They cannot stop all of a sudden and decide that they want to use something else. This means that consumers can only grow, and it will grow. Population growth will play a huge role in the growth of the global tissue industry. Since we have already established that tissue paper has no substitute, population growth in the biggest markets will only mean that the market expands. In addition, sustainable production of tissue paper, although it has been given importance now, is likely to grow in importance with the growth of the global tissue industry. We all know that trees have to be cut to produce tissue, and sustainability helps in environmental conservation.