RIP Jay Maine Mill

[barbender]

 Coated paper is a rapidly shrinking, dying market. Our local UPM/Blandin mill manager's whole strategy was hopefully to be the last man standing in an evaporating market- which I thought they said they are the last North American coated paper producer at this point.

Typically, the involvement of politicians has made issues worse. When all 3 of the Ainsworth OSB mills closed down, 2 of them were purchased with government money by some dreamy headed community foundations or something like that. The one in Grand Rapids was going to be repurposed into a "green energy campus", if they only set up the facility where manufacturers could set up to make solar panels, wind turbines etc obviously they would flock to it. Haha, I think there are aspen trees growing in the access road behind the gates now. Oh yeah, these do gooders/meddlers purchased these mills from Ainsworth with no compete clauses, so now they can't be used to produce OSB. Perfect sites with rail service etc. 

 Beenthere, the Advantech product has the moisture barrier on it, the seams are taped to complete the air seal. It eliminates the use of Tyvek, or on a roof they have a roof specific product that has an integral membrane that replaces tarpaper or synthetic roofing paper. If you see a building going up with green OSB, that's Advantech.

[beenthere]

Thanks barbender
Do you have a link that tells about the green product that eliminates the Tyvek ?

[barbender]

Here ya go, BT-

https://www.huberwood.com/zip-system/wall-sheathing?gclid=Cj0KCQjw7KqZBhCBARIsAI-fTKIXcp_AsitAKGGTqEpJ-8whLJlcq78Yw6R_JtahopeMTbOZeRqqjGUaAo1GEALw_wcB

[barbender]

I was somewhat mistaken, Advantech is Huber's OSB product, and it is called Zip system when it has the moisture membrane on it.

[nativewolf]

Yep govt interventions at a very site specific sort of level do more harm than good.  No matter the best intentions the politicians are fighting something the market is trying to fix.  

Govt interventions that do work are usually incentive based, tax credits, or crop specific subsidy to encourage  production of an industry (corn and methanol) where the govt subsidizes refineries for buying ethanol and the requires then to mix it.  It worked (millions of acres of corn getting turned into ethanol) and brought some industry into farm belts but the unintended consequence is that it hurt frackers.  

I don't think there's much we can do on the coated paper side of things other than tarrif up coated paper printed products coming from China.   That might do some good as the chinese govt is subsidizing that activity like crazy.  I think it would just be a blip though, coated paper is disappearing in daily life.  

Much easier for the govt to create a new market (computer chips, cell phones, solar production, ev's etc) than try to save a dying industry.  Wood fiber insulation strikes me as a potential huge win and the govt could offer incentives to support that (building codes to require more insulation for one), credits for "green" insulation for another.

[beenthere]

Thanks bb
Knew of GP's similar product ForceField with the added moisture barrier. Similar appears to the Huberwood Zip System. 
Have yet to see a green building using it tho. Will be on the lookout. 

[peakbagger]

One thing that I havent seen is if Pixelle is willing to sell the mill with no restrictions? Old Town was sold as scrap with no restrictions; thus Nine Dragons could restart it. Fraser didnt put restrictions on the deed but sold to a scrapper who tore most of it down. I think Madison had restrictions on the deed. Millinocket was mostly scrapped by the last owner. East Millinocket went bankrupt and was mostly whole but the town ended up with it and scrapped the papermachines. Bucksport was scrapped. 

[Mooseherder]

Maybe this has been mentioned before and I missed it.  Seems like cardboard mills should have popped up from all the home shipments going on to replace paper mills.  Retooling a building is doable. Those vans are running the highways full of boxes. 

[Firewoodjoe]

Our pulp mills are wide open and even lowered there spec. We are fortunate to have osb and brown paper mills. Unfortunately anything to do with magazines or computer paper was prolly a bad move years ago. 

[BurkettvilleBob]

The Jay closure is obviously terrible for those that are working there, but  I haven’t sent any wood there since the digester failed. I’ll be curious to see what the operation in Madison does for markets. I had initially heard they were hoping to largely use others by products for chips, but have recently heard of contracts with larger logging outfits.

[Ed_K]

 Things could change if Putin doesn't start that pipe line supplying Europe. The pipe line shut down for maintainance, but if the war keeps going the people in Europe may be looking for more pellets than the 860k tonns their getting now. Maybe firewood  .

[peakbagger]

Maybe this has been mentioned before and I missed it.  Seems like cardboard mills should have popped up from all the home shipments going on to replace paper mills.  Retooling a building is doable. Those vans are running the highways full of boxes.

Most of the corrugated packaging is made with recycled fiber and its costly to ship old cardboard so the mills tend to be close to the source. The owner of the Patriots owns several corrugated mills located right near big cities which reduces the cost to haul recycled fiber around. The waste cardboard has a lot of junk along with it, like plastic tape. I spent a bit of time at their plant in CT and at least half of what came in ended up getting hauled off to a landfill. For some reason they got a lot of golf balls mixed in with the recycled fiber. Years ago Bowater built a large, recycled fiber plant at East Millinocket and figured out that hauling all the recycled material up to East Millinocket didnt make sense. Sad to say, but Jay is just to far out in the woods to do anything recycled. The Chinese have talked about it in Rumford and Old Town but I don't see it happening with high fuel prices. 

[SwampDonkey]

Irving's Lake Utopia mill uses recycled cardboard. Amazing the amount of cardboard that goes in the recycle bin every month around here. I can imagine there is a lot of plastic tape in it, besides the sticker labels.

[peakbagger]

I saw a display of stuff that came in with the fiber at the recycled mil in East Millinocket Maine years ago. They had their "first dollar" in a display case, a crumbled up bill that had come out of a rejects screen. They didnt keep track of spare change but reportedly the employees knew where the change would come out in the process. No doubt jewelry would also show up. They also had bigger stuff like small engines, car batteries, starters, alternators and all sorts of electronics and other junk that had gotten rejected. The Kraft's actually ran recycling centers for large cities near their corrugated mill in CT in order to improve the quality of the recycled material sent to the mill.  

One of the issues with recycled fiber is that it breaks down and gets weaker every time its reused. Coated paper has to be made quite strong to run through high speed printing presses so the underlying fiber is a fir/spruce kraft pulp (Kraft is strong in German). Glossy magazine paper was in great demand for recycling. The mill I worked for in Wisconsin recycled a lot of magazines. Apparently, a lot of magazines were printed and sent from the midwest to speed delivery and reduce postage. There is a lot of waste at a printing plant and we bought the scrap in bales, so we got a lot of glossy magazines including the raunchiest porn out there. When the plant gave tours, they made sure to keep the visitors away from the bales of magazines in the warehouse. The Ridgid tool calendars were printed nearby so folks would dig through the bales and try to collect the pages from the newest edition before it was sent.    

[thecfarm]

I am seeing the Jay mill on trailers heading to somewhere.
I am seeing contractors coming in for nuts and bolts to put things together for shipping.  
I was talking to one of the contractors. 
He helped built a paper mill out of state, Indiana? Then many years later, he helped tear it down.