Green Report Card

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THE GAZETTE, MONTREAL, SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2007 ❚ ❚ ❚

GREEN REPORT CARD

PRODUCING OUR PAPER: PULP TO PRESS 1

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TREES

TRANSPORT

PULP

WATER

Loggers harvest trees in Quebec’s boreal forest using a feller-buncher, a large machine with a circular saw capable of felling more than 2,000 trees a day. Local sawmills in the Abitibi region and northern Laurentians cut the logs into lumber. Scrap wood is turned into wood chips for pulp and paper. The best fibre for newsprint is black spruce, which is combined with pine, fir and aspen to make pulp.

Sawmills load the wood chips into 66-foot semi-trailers, each carrying 20 tonnes of chips. The trucks head south to the Papier Masson newsprint mill near Gatineau, 30 kilometres east of Ottawa – a trip of up to seven hours. The mill receives 240 deliveries a week. Below, a truck is lifted on a mechanized ramp: When it’s almost perpendicular to the ground, its contents spill out.

The wood chips travel by conveyor belt to the mill, where they are sifted and washed. A thermomechanical process uses heat and pressure to soften the chips and grind them into pulp. The paper machine produces 1,300 metres of paper per minute. It takes 720,000 wood chips to make one tonne of newsprint – the equivalent of roughly 4,000 newspapers.

The mill releases more than 520 million litres of waste water per year – the equivalent of 208 swimming pools. It is treated in a series of watertreatment basins. Micro-organisms remove 99 per cent of the organic waste from the water before it is returned to the du Lièvre River. Solid waste is composted and trucked away as fertilizer for farmers’ fields. Wood remnants unsuitable for pulp are sold for particle board.

INSERTS

RECYCLING

DELIVERY

WASTE

Nearly 70 per cent of newspapers in Quebec are recycled. Recycling companies deliver the used newspaper to de-inking plants. Then the paper is turned into pulp and transformed into new newsprint or other paper products like tissues, egg cartons and insulation. The market for used newsprint is white hot because of growing demand for recycled paper and competition from China, a huge importer of used paper.

The Gazette’s 13 independent distributors and 60 subcontractors load the bundles into 80 trucks. The trucks take the bundles to depots around the city, where 800 carriers driving cars pick them up and deliver them to homes. Other trucks deliver newspapers to stores. The delivery fleet travels approximately 22,000 kilometres every day.

The printing plant discards about 600 tonnes of newsprint each year, which is picked up for recycling. A metal-recycling company collects aluminum plates and a waste management firm picks up toxic waste for disposal such as soiled rags used to clean the presses and solvent. Waste water is purified and tested twice a year by an independent firm.

The Gazette distributes 150,000,000 advertising inserts per year. Commercial printers like Transcontinental and Quebecor produce the flyers for advertisers and deliver them to The Gazette, on pallets by the thousands. Machines insert the flyers in the newspaper.

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PAPER

PLATES

The rolls of newsprint, which weigh up to 840 kilograms each, are loaded onto Papier Masson’s 53-foot trucks for delivery to The Gazette’s printing plant at 7001 St. Jacques St. W., a two-and-ahalf-hour trip. Newsprint shipments arrive at the printing plant twice a week. The newsprint is stored in a humidity-controlled room for up to three weeks.

Pages are electronically transmitted from The Gazette’s downtown office to the printing plant. A platemaker imprints the page image onto aluminum plates – one for each colour. About 600 plates are used per night. The aluminum is later recycled. Computerization has eliminated film and the chemicals needed to process it.

PRESSES

INK

Pressmen thread the rolls of newsprint onto the presses and the press run begins. The first 1,500 copies are discarded as the pressmen make adjustments. The presses produce 38,000 to 40,000 copies an hour and can print six sections at once. Once printed, the pages are folded and cut. The finished newspapers are bundled.

The plates, mounted on plate cylinders, pick up the required inks and transfer the image onto a blanket roller, which has a soft, rubber surface. The blanket roller prints the image onto the paper. Soy-based inks have replaced petroleum-based ones since The Gazette switched to new offset presses in 2002. The presses use about 82,000 kilograms of coloured ink and 115,000 kilograms of black ink each year – about 11 kilograms per tonne of newsprint.

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T E X T BY M A R I A N S C O T T , P H OTO S G O R D O N B E C K , W I T H G A Z E T T E F I L E P H OTO S , G R A P H I C K I M C H U T E T H E G A Z E T T E

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