Podcast: Loo roll goes geothermal – Mark Stevens, Essity (edited excerpt)
Listen to the full episode here.
Vincent
“I used to work in the print industry and that was a messy business. But that had cleaned itself up quite a lot by the time I left. Has tissue and paper gone through the same kind of industrial cleaning process?”
Mark
“The industry, like many of the extractive and manufacturing industries decades ago, wasn't down by the same regulations and social right to occupy that we have today. So, it didn't behave in the way that we expect people to behave today. But that's a long time ago. Our industry does have a large footprint globally. We work in an industry where we take a raw material, which is waste from trees, or people chop down trees to make it. We use large amounts of energy and water to make a product, which in our case people use once and throw away.”
Vincent
“Let's talk about the geothermal transfer, the shift. What had to happen for that to occur?”
Steven
“In tissue making, at the end of the paper machine is a very large drum, about 70 tonnes of cast iron, which the tissue paper goes over and the drum is heated to help dry it on the outside of hoods to help with the drying process. We converted the hoods to geothermal steam from 2009 onwards, but to convert the drum was a big deal.
Vincent
“What's the actual mechanism whereby the energy is transferred to the heat?”
Steven
“I'm not an engineer, but essentially, it's a direct heat process, except that we don't use the direct steam. It goes through a heat transfer process, but it's the heat from the steam that's drying the paper, and then that steam is returned back into the ground.”
Vincent
“Are you the only big industrial plant that is using geothermal for that kind of level of heating?”
Steven
“Across the road from us, the OG Pulp & Paper mill uses it. New Zealand, along with Italy, has been the leader in using geothermal steam since the 30s for both power generation and heat generation. We're certainly the only tissue mill in the world that uses geothermal steam in this manner.”
Listen to the full episode here.
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