HANNAH COX.
CAN’T WATCH THE SHOW?
KENNE-DVR IT. MAKE EVERY DAY A KENNE-DAY.
Full disclosure, when we first discussed paper
as a topic for this series,
I wasn’t sure it was relevant.
I mean, we live in a digital world, right?
And nowadays, most everything, it seems,
is documented up there in the cloud somewhere.
But make no mistake, down here on earth,
paper is the thing that makes it real and official,
from your birth certificate to your marriage certificate
to your death certificate to the deed on your home
to the diplomas hanging on your wall
and virtually everything in your wallet,
from your driver’s license to your money
to your vaccination card.
Your entire existence is memorialized on paper,
just like our countries, our constitution,
the laws of the land.
Every truth we hold to be self-evident
is preserved on paper,
along with every novel ever written,
every poem, every mathematical theorem,
every Sudoku, every crossword puzzle,
and yes, every square hanging in rolls
in lavatories across this great land,
waiting patiently to answer the call of duty.
Try replacing that with something in the cloud.
This episode is dedicated to the 50,000 men and women
who work every day, making sure we never run out of paper,
because they know better than most how America works.
(dramatic orchestral music)
Of all the products that surround our everyday existence,
few are quite so ubiquitous, or important, as paper,
probably because it can do a lot of really useful things,
like capturing our thoughts, carrying our goods,
putting money in our pockets,
or, among other things, cleaning up our messes.
Small wonder, then, that each and every American
uses about 700 pounds of it per year,
or that America, as a whole,
is one of the world’s leading paper producers,
churning out 200,000 tons of it every day.
And, believe it or not,
the paper manufacturers of our country
are busier than they’ve ever been,
in part thanks to the pandemic,
which has brought about record highs
in the demand for paper hygiene products
and is still driving the 200+ paper makers of our nation
harder than ever to keep us well supplied
with those products and more.
Take International Paper
in Columbus, Mississippi for example.
Here more, than 300 men and women labor day in and day out
to sustainably produce the pulp
needed to create our paper products.
And keeping an eye on all of that
is mill manager David Phillips.
- Here in Columbus, we take pine trees
and make them into products that you use every day,
like Bounty and Charmin and baby diapers and baby wipes
and things like that that are very important in our lives.
(dramatic orchestral music)
- [Mike] Whether it’s bound for paper towels
or personal care products,
the process of making that pulp is much the same.
First, you need a lot of wood chips.
Then, they have to be digested,
a process through which the actual wood fibers
are separated from the stuff that holds them together,
called lignin.
Once that’s done, those fibers, also known as cellulose,
are bleached, pressed flat, and dried into sheets of pulp.
Those are the broad strokes, anyway,
but we’ll get into further detail as we go,
starting with the wood that comes in
as either whole logs or, oftentimes, precut chips.
- So chip trucks are pulling onto the dumpers.
They’ll be dumping the chips out.
We can get up to 200 of these chip trucks a day.
It’s really important that we keep ’em working
like they’re supposed to.
- [Mike] Equally important is ensuring that these chips
arrive like they’re supposed to,
something David and his colleagues keep a close eye on
with every inbound truck.
- These are some of the Loblolly pine chips
that we get from sawmills in the area.
We’re sampling them to know kind of what the size is.
We want chips that are between two and 10 millimeters,
and everything else that’s not two and 10
we don’t pay as much for,
so looks like a good quality load to me.
We’re gonna take the chips and cook those
and bake that into the pulp that we make.
- [Mike] Not far away,
the pulp-making process is already in the works
with International Paper’s resident digester
breaking down wood chips by the ton
and preparing them to be bleached.
And keeping tabs on that and more
is operations technician Janice Buckhalter.
- This is the control room.
This is where everything happens.
So part of our responsibility, see all the monitors?
We have a lot of trends that we have called up
that we look at at all times,
and it lets us know things about levels, temperatures,
and pressures, which is key to our operation.
- [Mike] It’s a lot to monitor
and might as well be Greek to the uninitiated,
but thanks to more than 30 years on the job,
Janice can tell when things are working exactly as intended,
and when they aren’t.
- This chip bin release screen,
inches of water is kind of high.
So right now, we’re gonna go upstairs,
check out this chip bin release screen
and get it cleaned off.
- [Mike] Chip bin release screens are essential
to relieving pressure from the system,
and if left unclean,
this one could shut down the whole works.
So Janice will need to head eight stories up
to diffuse the situation.
(Janice panting)
- So I got my little headlamp
so I can kinda see what I’m doing.
I mean, you can actually see the gas
that’s coming up from the chip bin.
And because fine saw dust
that’s covering this little slotted screen,
’cause when you look at this,
these little slots have to be open.
- [Mike] Fortunately for Janice,
clogged screens like this one
are usually nothing an air lance can’t handle.
- I’m gonna just gradually ease the air on,
’cause I don’t want anything blowing back in my face.
And I’ll try to go as far as I can
to the other side of this line,
until I’m able to try to try clear the whole
circumference of this screen.
(air hissing)
I can definitely see an improvement in the gas screen.
Well, I think I’m done here.
I’ll bolt it back up till next time.
Woo!
All right.
On to the next pad.
- [Mike] Janice isn’t the only one
who has to fix issues on the fly,
because with all the steaming, chipping,
pulverizing, and pressing that goes on here,
it should come as no surprise to learn
that the machinery at International Paper
takes quite a beating.
So, to keep everything in working order,
there are guys like shift technician Bo Dyer.
- You’re pretty much responding to breakdowns
or responding to an operator,
trying to get equipment going or whatever the need might be.
You never know what you’re gonna be doing
or what you’re gonna be working on.
- [Mike] Well, that’s not entirely true,
because Bo does know what he’ll be working on momentarily:
one of the four automated stations responsible
for wrapping rolls of finished pulp with plastic,
and it seems that this one has been acting up lately.
- We got an intermittent column going on,
and I talked to the operator,
and I’m gonna have to go up underneath this axial table here
and take a look at some switches.
- [Mike] First, though,
Bo will need to shut this station down completely,
which, when dealing with electricity in excess of 500 volts,
requires a fair amount of safety gear.
(tense instrumental music)
- That’s my gloves.
Those gloves right there are rated for 1,000 volts.
Your hard hat, your shield.
And once I get the cabinet open...
we will verify that we’re electrically isolated...
and it will be safe to go in and work on this south line.
- [Mike] With that outta the way,
Bo can get down to the business at hand.
- All right, what I think we got going on here,
after talking to the operator, the roll comes down,
it hits this axial receiver right here,
and this is gonna lower,
and as it’s lowering, we’re not seeing it sometimes.
So, we got some prox switches underneath the table here,
and I’m gonna need to get under the table here
and see what I can find,
and see if that’s where our problem’s at.
- [Mike] Once under the table,
Bo is quick to spot the problem.
- [Bo] Okay, you got prox switches on both sides
of this axial station down here.
We’re thinking this guy right here might be the issue.
It does appear to be a little bit loose here.
Looks like I need to slide it down
roughly about a half an inch here.
I’m about to loosen up this lock nut and run this switch in.
(dramatic drum music)
All right, gonna lock it down right there.
I’m hoping this right here is gonna resolve our issue.
- [Mike] But to find out for sure,
Bo will need to fire this station back up
and bring in one of his colleagues for a second opinion.
- If you would, I’d like to get it started up.
Let’s run it, and let me know what you see.
(curious percussion music)
(machinery whirring)
If it messes up, just call me, but I believe I got it.
Yep.