In last week's issue, CHRIS HARRIS demonstrated that the proposed Tasmanian pulp mill will harm the state's economy, requiring continual subsidies in order to be "competitive". Here he looks at the question of alternatives to the planned kraft, chlorine bleaching mill.
Although the government has not bothered to investigate them, there may be considerably better options than the proposed pulp mill.
There are a variety of different pulping and bleaching techniques. Kraft is simply one type of chemical pulping process, and chlorine bleaching is one of a number of bleaching possibilities.
In addition, there are a variety of different feed stocks that can be used to supply such mills. These include various types of wood, such as hardwoods and softwoods, in varying combinations of old growth, regrowth and plantation timber, as well as alternative feed stocks such as hemp and kenaf.
There are strong links between the type of feed stock and the type of mill which can be built. One of the principal motivations for building a kraft chlorine mill is that North Broken Hill wants to produce what is known as market pulp. This is pulp sold on the world market rather than dedicated to a particular mill.
The most widely traded market pulp is kraft. But kraft mills are very capital intensive and economic only when they are processing around 2 million tonnes of wood annually. This amount could be supplied only by harvesting most of Tasmania's old-growth native forest.
If a company is bent on logging native forests, the only currently accepted method of producing pulp of sufficient strength and whiteness is to have a chemical mill using chlorine or chlorine derivatives to bleach the pulp. Thus there is a circular linkage between NBH's strategy, the need for a kraft mill and the destruction of Tasmania's old-growth forests.
On the other hand, if other feed stocks are used, they can be treated in much smaller mechanical mills, which would be economic at much lower volumes of production.
In Tasmania, a mechanical mill could be operational by 1995 if it was economically viable, using only plantation timber and some regeneration and regrowth forest. No native old growth forest would be required.
By 1995 there would be, on Forestry Commission estimates, 607,000 tonnes of plantation and regrowth wood available in the north of the state and the central highlands. A mechanical mill would require only 500,000 tonnes annually.
New mechanical mills such as the Western Millar pulp mill in Saskatchewan, Canada, have solved many traditional problems such as high energy use and effluent with high oxygen demand.
The new mill is virtually pollution-free, and power consumption is greatly reduced. If a chip mill was closed at the same time a ned in Tasmania, there would be no increase in demand for power. Mechanical mills consume about a third of the water used by kraft mills.
Such mills are more labour intensive, employing about the same number of people for less than half the initial investment and about half the timber use. The employment multipliers are therefore likely to be higher. Similarly, because the wood will come substantially from plantations, employment in the forests would be higher.
Mechanical mills are not the only option. A new process known as Organosolv is being tested in Canada. A similar process is already commercially operational in Germany and has the potential to produce market pulp without the need for chlorine bleaching.
Similarly, the use of alternative feed stocks such as hemp would eliminate the need for chlorine bleaching, whatever type of mill was used, because hemp is low in lignins, which darken the wood and require use of chlorine to bleach it effectively.
The Netherlands government is currently supporting trials with hemp, which it sees as having the potential to supply most of the country's needs for printing and writing paper.
The state government and NBH have tried to argue that no market exists for anything other than kraft pulp. This is not true. Forest Resources, a Tasmanian-based company, has already proposed building a 500,000 tonne mechanical mill in the north to supply about 200,000 tonnes of pulp for printing and writing paper.
Mechanical pulp is the fastest growing sector of the pulp industry, and is taking up an increasing share of the world market pulp supply. Within Australia, some 380,000 tonnes of printing and writing paper are imported, making a ready market for paper produced by such a mill.
Unfortunately, the government appears unable or unwilling to look at the full range of alternatives, whether they be alternatives that rule out a pulp mill entirely, such as removing NBH's subsidies and spending them elsewhere, or mills other than a kraft mill.
It appears locked into a strategy that benefits NBH and its interstate shareholders and disadvantages Tasmanians. One can only assume that Premier Field sees such a strategy as advancing his electoral interests in his home constituency of Braddon, where such a mill would be based, and does not care about the interests of Tasmanians at large. n