MTO: Turning pulp into profit

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Turning pulp into profit
Weyerhaeuser's Macon County mill is an environmental model

By Johnathan Burns
The Macon Telegraph

OGLETHORPE - Even in the shadows of the pulp mill's smokestack, the flowers smell like flowers here.

And if you can believe that - that a pulp mill can smell like something other than a pulp mill - then you can believe the Weyerhaeuser people when they say they don't want their business to be seen or smelled; that they want to be known for coaching local Little League teams; that they can make money by killing trees, but do it without hurting wildlife or the environment.

"I've never been in a town where there was a pulpwood mill, and you could never smell it," said Claude Fullerton, executive director of Macon County's Development Authority and president of the chamber of commerce. "Their environmental record is impeccable. Their safety record is impeccable."

And so, apparently, are their jobs. The last time Weyerhaeuser's Flint River Site in Macon County opened 20 positions for hire, the company received 3,000 applications. In an industry where job turnover routinely runs 10 to 12 percent a year, the Macon County facility loses only 3 to 4 percent of its employees annually.

"Our attrition is basically non-existent," said Kent Walker, vice president and site manager for the Macon County plant. "I think that says something about us."

This can also be said for the plant: It produces enough pulp to make 30 million diapers a day. That's Luvs and Huggys throughout North America and Europe. That's a lot of dryness, straight from Macon County.

"About 55 to 60 percent of what we make here goes to foreign markets," said Walker, referring to emerging foreign markets just now catching the wave of disposable diapers. "Most of North America is already saturated."

Weyerhaeuser is relatively new to Middle Georgia. The company, headquartered in Washington, bought Procter & Gamble Co.'s Macon County plant in 1992. The facility opened in 1981 because Procter & Gamble wanted a sole supplier for what was then a huge domestic growth industry in disposable diapers. The company also bought several thousand acres of timberland throughout Georgia to maintain a steady supply of loblolly pines to the Flint River mill.

But Procter & Gamble decided to rid itself of its forestry and pulp operations to concentrate more on its other manufacturing facilities, and in stepped Weyerhaeuser.

The company bought the Flint River plant and retained its employees. It also bought the Oaky Woods, a 15,000-acre tract of land in Houston County. That land is leased by the state and is used as a game preserve for hunters while the pine trees on the property mature. Weyerhaeuser owns more than 300,000 acres of timberland in Georgia and 5.4 million acres nationwide. It has cutting rights to about 25 million acres in Canada.

A clean plant

At the Flint River plant, Weyerhaeuser has one of the cleanest pulp mills in the nation. In 1997, it was designated one of the Environmental Protection Agency's "Project XL" sites - the third facility in the U.S. to receive the designation. The program is designed to produce superior environmental performances from large manufacturers.

Also in 1997, the EPA commended the facility for exceeding voluntary waste elimination and pollution prevention programs.

The facility now has a $25 million payroll and close to 450 employees, making it the second-largest employer in the county.

Private landowners within a 100-mile radius of the plant fuel the pulp producing process at the plant with 18- to 20-year-old pines.

Those trees are referred to as "juvenile wood." Older wood is used for lumber. The whole process begins in places like Oaky Woods, where Weyerhaeuser employees such as Larry Walker manage the company's forests.

"We have all ages of forests here," he said last week while touring the area. "The final product we're aiming for is high-grade saw timber (for lumber)."

Some parts of Oaky Woods are covered in 25-year-old pines. The hardwoods are much older. The company routinely prunes or thins stands of trees to allow the remaining ones to grow larger. The thinned trees are used for pulp.

The company also has a program to help private landowners manage their pines. The company provides the service for free, hoping to improve public relations and plant the company's good reputation in their minds when they eventually sell the wood.

The Flint River plant consumes about 6,000 tons of wood a day, said Frank Wohrley, a Weyerhaeuser environmental engineer.

Processing the pines

First, the limbs are removed from the trees. They are then sent through a train-sized tumbler that scales off their bark. Then, short sections of the pines are sent through a huge chipper that reduces the mighty trees to little more than chunky dust. Those pine chips are then cooked in one of the world's largest "digesters" Ñ a huge, cylindrical cooker at the Flint River plant that looks like a Saturn V rocket. The chips are then bleached and eventually rendered to a paste that is then pressed and heated into a cardboard-thick sheet of paper. The paper is wrapped into 20-ton rolls.

Weyerhaeuser then ships the paper to its 13 major customers, who fluff the pulp into the absorbent padding in diapers for babies and undergarments for adults.

"It's basically like cotton," said Gary Strandburg, environmental manager at the Flint River plant. "The fibers act practically the same way."

The plant wastes little. Lagoons stretch behind the facility where "dirty" water gets air. Once the water is clean enough, it's sent into the Flint River.

"We have microbes in the lagoons that break down what's in there," Strandburg said. "What we put in the river doesn't consume much oxygen, so it has no effect on the fish. The whole process is recycle and reuse."

The plant uses bark scraped from the trees for fuel.

"Waste is an inefficiency," Wohrley said.

And Weyerhaeuser, apparently, doesn't like inefficiency. The company's 1998 net income of $294 million reveals that, as does the company's 140th ranking that year in the Fortune 500.

But profits are only part of what concerns Weyerhaeuser, Walker said.

"We want to be a good corporate citizen," he said. "We want to be the low-cost producer for our product. We want to be the benchmark for the industry in the environment. We're proud of the fact we're on the leading edge."

That edge may be the main reason - for the first time in more than a decade of chamber-type work - that Fullerton has a company to recommend to be named Georgia's existing industry of the year. The award is presented to the most qualified business in each of the state's 12 regions by the Georgia Economic Developer's Association.

"Look, you can't appreciate them unless you've been in a community where a pulpwood mill has been so bad," he said. "And these people get involved in everything. I've been in the chamber business for 15 years, and I've never had an industry I wanted to nominate for this award before."