Millar Western Pulp (Meadow Lake) Ltd.
Saskatchewan, Canada

For more than a decade, the Navy's Best Manufacturing Practices (BMP) survey process has been a primary avenue for industry and government to present individual and distinctive success stories in management and manufacturing disciplines. For those organizations seeking to advance their overall manufacturing performance, the BMP program has provided validated and documented best practices. These practices, verified on-site by BMP survey team members, have served as a model for improvement in business and industry and as a tool to promote teaming.

In 1995, industry and government representatives discussed the idea of broadening the BMP program's scope to incorporate success stories submitted by industry. The objective was to find an efficient, cost-effective way to share a greater volume of information on the latest technology and business developments. Since the BMP program had a proven approach for sharing success stories, this seemed to be a logical expansion.

The practices in this report were submitted to the BMP Center of Excellence by Millar Western Pulp (Meadow Lake) Ltd, located in Saskatchewan, Canada as an example of some of the latest developments in the environmental area. They are considered to be best practices or success stories, however, they were not validated by an on-site BMP survey team. Our goal is to help industry and government keep pace with the rapid changes taking place in the business, manufacturing, and environmental communities.

Background: Although Millar Western meets all governmental regulations for air emissions, both gaseous and particulate, the company is striving to decrease emissions of both types of materials.

Description: Incineration of bark and waste fibre and wind action on electrostatic precipitator ash lead to particulate emissions, and anaerobic activity in its waste water holding pond results in the generation of malodorous compounds such as reduced sulphur species.

Results: Resolving these concerns will result in an environmental benefit of decreasing particulate and gaseous emissions, as well as enable the company to maintain harmonious relations with its neighbors.

Background: Smelt (predominantly sodium carbonate) from Recovery Boiler is being landfilled. Opportunity exists, and is being actively explored, to convert the smelt to an alkali source for pulping/bleaching of woodfibre.

Results: Besides the environmental benefit of decreasing the amount of material being landfilled, recovery of the alkali would lead to reductions in the cost of manufacturing pulp as purchased caustic needs would decrease.

Background: One of the major challenges facing the pulp and paper industry is reducing the negative effects of liquid effluents on natural waterways. In the company's greenfield installation, which commenced operations in 1992, the problem of effluent discharge to waterways was decisively dealt with by construction of a zero liquid effluent discharge facility.

Description: There is no pipeline from the mill to any waterway - all of the process waste water is treated and 80% is recycled as distilled water for reuse in the process. The remaining 20% of the water is lost in the drying of the final pulp product, and by evaporation from effluent and treated water holding ponds.

Results: The effluent treatment sytem uses conventional evaporation, concentration and incineration unit operations to effect this significant accomplishment.

Background: Millar Western Pulp is actively pursuing reduction and elimination of air emissions, both particulate and gaseous. Particulate emission sources are being identified and testing is on-going to determine particulate characteristics and mass loadings.

Results: This information will be used to develop the best plan for dealing with the emissions. A similar approach is being used to deal with malodorous volatile organic compound emissions.

Background: Loss of fibre through debarking of logs and rejection fibre during cleaning leads to a significant loss of feedstock that must be treated through incineration. Work is being done on recovering as much of this fibre as possible in order to maximize fibre usage.

Results: The environmental benefits would be the need to harvest less trees to meet customer needs and incineration of less material with a concomitant decrease in CO² emissions. Economically, decreased production costs would be realized through better utilization of feedstock material.

Background: Millar Western is currently running a pilot plant to determine the feasibility of recycling the smelt from the Recovery Boiler for use as an alkali source in the pulp mill.

Results: Work to date has demonstrated the potential of replacing some of the purchased alkali (caustic) with recycled smelt.