For years I’ve known that the paper we supply in our
Circa notebooks,
pads and
3 x 5 cards was made of American reforested paper and certified to be so. But I wanted to see the process for myself.
I wanted to walk the forests where the trees grow and see how they were cut. I was curious to see how the logs traveled to the mill and how, once there, they were converted into the sheaves of snowy white stock that provides such a pleasing canvas for our thoughts.
Last fall I made the trip, traveling backwards along our supply chain to the forest. What I found surprised and pleased me, as it may you.
Walking the paper trail
My trip started at our printer in Maine, a multi-generational family business that is one of the state’s large employers. I watched as the paper destined for our notebooks and pads reached the midpoint of its journey. Workers hoisted the blank paper on one-ton pallets into the feeding station of their printing presses.
Each pallet contains 20,000 sheets. On the presses, the blank sheets undergo their transformation of rules, margins and other designs that make the paper primed for handwriting.
Next the paper is trimmed, punched, stitched and assembled into its various forms for Levenger pads, cards, journals and Circa notebooks. It’s not only the folks working at the printing plant, but others in the surrounding community working in converted textile mills as well, who do the handwork involved in assembling Circa notebooks. They then shrinkwrap them to ensure they arrive at your door in pristine condition. It was a good feeling to shake hands with New Englanders who took such pride in making quality products.
But where do those pallets of snowy-white stock come from? That was my next destination: International Paper’s paper mill in Ticonderoga, New York.
Into the woods
From Maine I traveled with the head of our printing operations the few hundred miles west into an overcast November afternoon, through Vermont and New Hampshire, and on to upstate New York. The trip took us through small towns and alongside miles of forests. It was dark when we crossed over Lake Champlain and arrived at Ticonderoga. After a long day, we turned in early.
It was still overcast and lightly raining early the next day as we drove the few miles to a forest tract that had recently been harvested. At the head of a logging road, Bob McCormack was waiting for us in his green pickup. Bob is responsible for acquiring the logs the Ticonderoga mill uses. He’s lived in upstate New York all his life and earned his degree in forestry from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. In his heavy boots and orange vest, Bob looked like a person accustomed to walking in forests.
As we walked into the woods, Bob gave me a bit of history.
“Actually the amount of forest in New York State is now three times the acreage it was one hundred years ago,” he said. Back then, Bob explained, lots of small farms had been cut into the forest. Today, with the consolidation of farms elsewhere, the forest has reclaimed most of that farmland.
The forest tract we visited is managed by a major supplier of pulpwood for the Ticonderoga mill. The company maintains forest management certifications under the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).
Taking a tree census
Around us were plenty of tree stumps, but also enough standing trees that it still felt like a walk in the woods. A logging tractor, called a skidder, sat ready to go to its next harvesting.
Bob explained that before harvesting, foresters walk and map the area, compiling a census of the trees by species, size, age and health. Then they devise a plan based on a selection method where some trees are harvested and others are left to mature.
This is when I began to appreciate the meaning of the term “sustainable.” This selection method of harvesting maintains the health of the tract; in another 15 years it will be ready to be harvested again.
The trees grow in a near-perfect assortment for the high-quality paper the mill produces. Bob explained the formula:
“We need a blend of about 70 percent hardwoods to 30 percent softwoods, which add the long fibers for optimal strength. The hardwoods are mostly sugar and red maples, yellow birch, American beech, and red oak, while the softwoods are mostly Eastern white pine and Northeastern pine species.”
The partial clearing that occurs from harvesting allows sunlight to reach younger trees and seedlings. In the first three to five years, grasses grow, providing food for deer and other wildlife. So this 15-year cycle of growth, selection method harvesting and regeneration is beneficial for the ecosystem—the trees thrive on it. Plus, the risk of fire declines as density and underbrush are reduced.
The foresters pay careful attention to water runoff. “You don’t want equipment running over a stream, which can lead to silt downstream in the lakes,” Bob explained. “The management plan either avoids sensitive streams entirely, or if a stream must be crossed with equipment, a temporary bridge will be built so as not to disturb the banks and stream bed.”
In the forestland immediately around the mill, Bob estimates the harvesting and re-growth are probably in a steady state, although statewide, trees are growing faster than they are being harvested.
On to the mill
The trees that Bob’s team selects are cut into 8-foot logs and trucked in specially-made open trailers to the mill, about 90 miles away—a relatively short distance that results in a smaller carbon footprint. (Most of the wood the Ticonderoga mill uses comes from forests within 100 miles.) We drove there behind such a rig and watched as cranes lifted the logs off the trucks and into piles once we reached our destination.
The current Ticonderoga mill is the descendant of a mill that began operation in 1882. It was built in 1969 on the shore of Lake Champlain, just a few miles north of the old mill site. The old industrial site has been transformed into a park and greenbelt in the heart of town and provides recreational space for residents and visitors. While the mill looked huge to me, it is actually a medium to small mill by international standards, and makes only high-quality paper suited to the hardwood forest surrounding it.
Here’s what the mill looks like from Google Earth.
Panning out on the image gives you a sense of the forest to be found in all directions. (The mill is in the yellow dot.)
My tour guides at the mill were two International Paper customer service leaders, Mark Russell and Peter Veverka. Peter holds a Ph.D. from the Institute of Paper Chemistry at Georgia Tech. After watching a safety video, I was introduced to the mill manager, Chris Mallon. He oversees the 101 salaried workers and 506 hourly workers, who are represented by the United Steel Workers. The mill’s spokesperson, Donna Wadsworth, told me that an additional 600 to 700 independent loggers and truckers earn their living providing wood for the mill.
I would guess that most visitors would be surprised, as I was, that the mill is actually inside the Adirondack State Park. The mill falls under the jurisdictions of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Adirondack Park Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers (since the mill is on a commercial waterway) and the Town of Ticonderoga. All environmental reports that the New York environmental authority requires are copied to their counterparts in Vermont, since Vermont is just across the lake and its residents have a vested interest in the environmental impact of the mill.
Not surprisingly, given where it is located, the Ticonderoga mill does not produce the noxious smells we might associate with a paper mill. Only once during my lengthy tour did I get a whiff of something I wouldn’t want to smell all day, and even that was fleeting. There’s no way the people living in this scenic region would tolerate a mill that didn’t meet stringent environmental and health regulations and standards, nor would the environmental authorities.
Re-energizing, debarking and digesting
The chemical process used to break down the wood fiber produces a black liquor byproduct, which the mill captures and burns, providing part of the energy the mill uses.
Bark and wood chips also provide fuel, so that about 50 percent of the mill’s energy needs come from biofuel. The other half comes from No. 6 fuel oil.
The logs off-loaded from the trucks begin their processing by being dropped into a steel flume, where they float, single file, to a conveyor that carries them up into a giant debarking drum.
Imagine a front-loading washer big enough to tumble together 30 or 40 8-foot logs. Instead of a glass door in front, nozzles spray high-pressure water on the logs as they tumble like so many tan-colored socks. I stood above on a steel walkway, leaning over a railing, mesmerized by this roaring spectacle that made earplugs mandatory.
Clean, debarked logs tumble out from the drum onto another steel conveyor on their way to the chipper, where knives cut each log into the small uniform chips needed to start making paper. These chips are then processed in a large vessel called a digester. There heat, pressure and chemicals break down the chips, separating the lignin and releasing the fiber that will be washed and bleached, creating bright white pulp to furnish the paper machines.
The paper machines are also Paul Bunyan-sized affairs. This mill has two—one is 280 inches across and the other 212 inches wide. Long as city blocks, these two machines run 24 hours a day, slowing churning out giant rolls of virgin paper. These are cut into manageable rolls and sheets of various dimensions, then packed up for printers like ours.
Paper for the ages (and coffee tables)
International Paper brands our paper Accent Opaque. It is acid-free, archival quality, and one of its main uses is for books. Publishing houses in the United States prize this paper for its bright surface that prints like a dream with little show-through. (We use such high-quality paper for our Levenger Press books, often in a heavier weight than you find in most bookstore-edition books.) When you’re taking notes in your Levenger notebooks, know that you’re writing on what could have as easily become the pages of a coffee-table book.
There’s more to come in Part 2 of this blog, which will be my next posting. In the meantime, I welcome your comments as always. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).
