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CHIPPING
AWAY
The Mercer Peace River wood room revitalization is turning the mill’s past into its future
BY TOM NDEKEZI
When Mercer began the process of bringing its Peace River mill in line with the company’s sustainability goals, there was one logical starting place: the wood room. The heart of the mill’s operations, the wood room is where harvested lumber is chipped and then cooked to separate the wood’s natural oils and the pulp that is later dried into sheets. The wood room was initially a key part of the Mercer Peace River mill when it first began operations in 1990, but due to mainte- nance demands and a lack of capacity, it was slowly replaced by a team of portable wood chippers. But while convenient, the environmental costs of chipping lumber directly on-site eventually began to
outweigh the benefits.
“As times changed and technology
changed, it became apparent that it
was not a very green model,” says Roger Ashfield, Managing Director at Mercer Peace River, located approximately 500 kilometres northwest of Edmonton, the provincial capital. “You’re talking about
a mill that doesn’t draw power from the grid, but here we are using diesel-driven machines in the bush to create our chips, which is offsetting all the good things we’re doing at the mill.”
So as part of the over $75-million Fibre Procurement Project aimed at improving Mercer Peace River’s environmental per- formance, the mill transformed the wood
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