paper_mills

**Paper Mills: Their Influence on the Environment**
__Basic Info.__

As the title states, I've decided to do my final project on a topic which is very sensitive to me: the environment. Focusing more on the issues of tree harvesting and how that affect us. Paper mills provide us with paper of course but there are side effects such as pollutions and the depleting amount of trees available to us. There are two different ways tree's are collected to be used to make paper/furniture and so on, either through tree harvesting or clearcutting. Tree harvesting takes more money and time as they go through the forest to pick out the fairly older trees. Clearcutting is simply cutting down the whole forest. This method is the most economical however it also means that young saplings would be taken down as well.

//"In 1995 alone, 1 877 763 trees were destroyed through either clearcutting or harvesting. In that time, only 461 551 trees are confirmed to be replanted or reseeded. This means that 1 416 212 trees were lost and not replaced. We are slowly working to improve the current situation, and the first step to solving this problem is increasing awareness."// ([|http://www.statcan.ca/english/)]





__About Paper Mills__

//"The undesirable odor (usually at pulp mills, which are a little different from paper mills) is caused principally by processing by-products, specifically the hydrogen sulfide and other reduced sulfur gases resulting from the cooking process. These airborne particles are not harmful to the health of the community in commonly occurring concentrations, but they are considered a nuisance. The Kraft process of reducing wood logs to their fibre constituent is primarily responsible for the odour, as opposed to the sulfite process.

Paper mills can be fully-integrated mills or smaller processing mills. The integrated mill will receive the whole forest log (or wood chips), process it down to the individual fiber level and into a 4% (approximately) pulp slurry, then process that pulp slurry into a sheet of paper. Non-integrated mills cannot process the log or wood chips but instead purchase preprocessed pulp slurry in a dried and baled form, known as market pulp, from pulp mills. The pulp bales are then rehydrated into a 4% solution in order to be processed into a sheet of paper.

The modern paper mill uses large amounts of energy, water, and wood in a highly efficient and extremely complex series of processes, using modern and sophisticated controls technology to produce a sheet of paper that can be used in incredibly diverse ways. Modern paper machines are very large and can be 500 feet in length, produce a sheet 400 inches wide, and operate at speeds of over 60 mph (100 km/h)"// ([|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_mill)]



//A map of Canada's paper mills//

//The Legend for the above map//

__Approach__

I've decided to focus on the interaction or cause and effect of paper mills on trees, then from the trees how they can affect other surrounding factors. The idea is to show how many tres are taken down by paper mills, on a timeline and then looking at trees individually what happens when that tree is gone/present. I was thinking along the lines of like, perhaps the trees affect the air. Seeing as when there are less trees, less carbon dioxide is absorbed and less oxygen produced. Or how, the habitat is being destroyed for the animals that live there. Another point of view, would be to see how much paper is produced by one tree. The timeline is also to show the number of new paper mills that are built, and the rate of which the trees are cut down/re-planted. To show the effect on the environment I will have to choose one aspect to illustrate.

__Process__

Here I'm trying to get a mental graph of how the data relates to eachother, from this I decided that I should leave out the wildlife and paper and so on, everything I mentioned above.



I thought about the differnt elements and tried to illustrate them. The "nodes", I suppose?

In the end I decided to go with simply, the data between a paper mill and the trees it takes down throughout the years. I wanted to do it on carbon dioxide but there was already another student who did that topic...and our ideas were similar enough already.

Here's the final .swf

[|dra_jenneeyang_pro3.swf] Rationale