Karioi Pulp facts & figure Steady mill development

Ruapehu Bulletin, Volume 9, Issue 424, 18 February 1992, Page 10

Karioi Pulp facts & figure

Steady mill development

What does it take to make one million tonnes of pulp? To start with, 2,800,000 tonnes of wood. The amount of paper used to wrap the one million tonnes would stretch from

Ohakune to Jakarta and back again. Fifteen hundred tonnes of wire was used to wrap the bales. Forty five million litres of oil was used. At present, the mill uses approximately one per cent of the total electricity produced in New Zealand at any one time. Wage bill The wage and salary

budget for 1992 is $6,600,000. The wage and salary account since the mill opened in 1978, expressed in today's terms, would exceed $90 million, most of it spent in the Ohakune, Taihape

and Waiouru communities. Winstones owned about 50 houses for their staff in the area, mostly in Ohakune and Raetihi, and still has 40. And what will happen to the pulp from the one millionth tonne? It is now on its way to a mill in Indonesia which is one of the largest

manufacturers of school exercise books in the world. The

books it produces could end up on a desk in the Middle

East, or in Ncl America - beil its market ara

Allthe whilethe Karioi Pulp Mill has been producing its

million tonnes of pulp it has been growing and changing.

It started life as a thermomechanical mill, whereby pulp was produced using heat and machine. In 1982 the mill process was converted to produce chemi thermomechanical

pulp (C1MH. bodium sulphite is impregnated into the wood chip to aid pulping. In 1984 high consistency bleaching equipment, using hydrogen peroxide, was installed. In 1985 expansion of the mill's capacity was carried out to allow

production of 125,000 tonnes per year, through new big refiners and auxiliary equipment. In 1987 screw presses and a twinwire press to improve washing was installed. Between 1986 and 1990 bark drying equipment, a bark burner, heat recovery and other energy

saving equipment has been installed. In 1989 the mill switched to high consistency secondary stage refining, ie, close to that for the first stage refining. In 1990 a distributed control system (DCS) data system was installed to improve the running of the plant and quality control.