Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Visit to Guangzhou Paper Mill

Thanks to the hospitality of our hosts at South China University of Technology, we were able to visit a newsprint mill in the city of Guangzhou, the Guangzhou Paper Company.  So Wednesday became our excursion day, with a trip to the paper mill (about one hour by public bus) followed by a visit to Beijing Road (a popular and crowded shopping area), and a night cruise on the  Pearl River (to be described in a following post). 

The Guangzhou Paper Company is a recycled newsprint mill that produces about 1100 tons per day.  They have three fiber processing lines and five paper machines, which the largest running at over 1500 m/min.  We were not able to take pictures inside the mill, but here is the entrance to the mill.

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Our tour guide for the day was Mr. Zhong who is the Director of the Production Department and a Senior Engineer with the company.  We were able to see the production process from the raw material coming in all the way to the warehouse.  The company brings in wastepaper from all over the world with about 60% of its material coming from the US, about 30% from Europe, and only 10% being acquired domestically from China.  They do feel that the wastepaper from Europe is generally of a better quality.

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The mill is also famous and quite proud of the visit to the mill by Mao Zedong in 1956.  The have commemorated this visit in a large photo that is posted as you enter the fill.  Of course, we had to have the  obligatory photo of our visiting group with this phone in the background.  We appreciated the opportunity to visit the mill in China, and the students were somewhat surprised to find how similar the mills are to US mills.

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