Action Town - Ollie Saves the Planet, Australia - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Rethink

Waste Activities, continued

Kimberly-Clark - Reducing and Reusing Waste

In Kimberly-Clark's tissue making process, eucalypt wood from plantations is digested in a 'pressure cooker' to release the cellulose fibres. After cooking, the liberated fibres are screened and in this process 'knots' of dense wood are removed.

These knots were previously disposed of as solid waste.

Research found that the knots were soft enough after cooking to be ground up and the fibres liberated. So an additional grinding process was added at the mill, which now recovers around 30 tonnes a week of fibres which had formerly been a solid waste.

Kimberly-Clark is committed to reducing waste and recycles many other process 'wastes', especially cardboard and plastic packaging. It is continually looking at all possible productive uses for the residues produced by the paper manufacturing process.

Visy - Recovering Energy from Waste

Visy Industries has constructed a $400 million pulp and paper mill at Tumut, in regional New South Wales, which uses two boiler systems to recover chemicals used in the pulping process and burn waste fuels to create energy.

Visy Paper has installed a waste to energy gasification facility at its mill at Coolaroo, Victoria, to recover energy from waste as a substitute for other power used in its paper making process.

Visy truck with waste paper bales A by-product of making recycled paper from waste paper results in a waste stream of "rejects."

Rejects consist of paper fibres, plastic, staples, wax and a variety of other materials that are gathered up in the waste paper collection and recycling process.

Until recently, the 65,000 tonnes per year of rejects from the company's three paper mills in Melbourne, Victoria, were sent to landfill.

Now they are fed into the gasification facility, reducing the greenhouse gas emissions by 95,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.