Nicole - Design Brief & Images

Design Brief

Audience: 

The audience my brochure will be targeting are CEO’s of large pulp mills. The CEO of any business are usually the ones to make big decisions, especially when it comes to a different way of doing things. They will also know what’s best for their company and have an open mind to “going green” whether it be their product itself or their factories. CEO’s know that Individuals as well as other companies feel better when they buy materials from places that want to help the earth, simply because they believe it will also help reduce pollution. So this product could potentially make them more money, while they reverse their carbon footprint.

Knowledge: 

A pulp mill is a factory that converts wood chips into thick fibre boards, which is then shipped to a paper mill where they can do what they please with it. Pulp mills are highly pollutant to the air, water and land. These fibre boards can be manufactured using mechanical, semi-chemical or fully chemical methods and can be bleached or non-bleached; based on what the customer wants. Wood and other materials used to make pulp contain three main components besides water: Cellulose fibers that are desired in paper making, lignin which is a three-dimensional polymer that binds the cellulose fibers together, and hemicelluloses which are shorter branches of carbohydrate polymers. 

Mechanical pulp mills: There are four types of pulp made by these mills. Stone ground-wood pulp is ground with stones embedded with silicon carbide or aluminum oxide. Pressure grounded pulp is wood ground in a pressurized sealed grinder. Refiner mechanical pulp is simply wood chips ground with metal plates. Lastly, thermo-mechanical pulp is when wood chips get steamed while they are ground. These mechanical mills use high levels of energy, mostly electricity. 

Chemical pulp mills: These mills use processes called the kraft process and the sulfite process in order to remove most of the hemicellulose and lignin from the wood chips. The kraft process does less damage to the wood which makes the fibers stronger than the ones that are treated with sulfite. The sulfite process however, makes the fibers in wood chips easier to bleach. These processes use a combination of high temperature and alkaline or acidic chemicals to break lignin bonds. This process creates a high volume of chemical fumes, as well as high levels of energy to keep high temperatures going. 

Chemical-mechanical pulp mills: In chemical mills, they pretreat wood chips with harsh chemicals. The conditions of the chemical treatment in these mills are much less harsh because they use lower temperatures, shorter times and less extreme pH level because the goal is to make the fibers easier to refine. Pulps made using these hybrid processes are known as chemi-thermomechanical pulps. These mills use equal amounts of chemicals and energy levels, however they are still bad for the environment.

Plan: 

The plan is to help these factories as a whole, go green. Between the three types of mills, they all use a lot of energy, chemicals and water for their processes. MBDC will lower the amount of chemical usage by finding a way to break down the hard fibers in wood chips with a natural material that will in turn make the pulp itself less pollutant to the environment. These mills will have their own energy built by generating it with solar panels and/or wind turbines. As for water, they will install a water treatment plan so that no water leaves or gets reused improperly.