Paper Making

Indian Paper Industry Likely To Touch 11.5 Mt by 2011-12

 

The ASSOCHAM paper on "Growth of Paper Industry in India", indicated that  per capita paper consumption increased to 9.18 kg on 2009-10 as compared to 8.3 kg during 2008-09. Still, the figure is low (9.2 kg) compared to 42 kg in China and 350 kg in developed countries.

India has emerged as the fastest growing market when it comes to consumption, posting 10.6% growth in per capita consumption of paper in 2009-10.

India produces many varieties of papers, namely, printing and writing paper, packaging paper, coated paper and some speciality paper. Varieties under printing and writing paper are creame wove paper, super printing paper, maplitho paper (non-surface and surface size), copier paper, bond paper and coating base paper and others. The varieties under packaging paper are kraft paper, boards, poster paper and others. The other varieties under coated paper are art paper/board, chromo paper/board and others. There are approximately 600 paper mills in India, of which twelve are major players.

Paper in India is made from 40 per cent of hardwood and bamboo fibre, 30 per cent from agro waste and 30 per cent from recycled fibre. Newsprint and publication paper account for 2 million tonnes, of which 1.2 million tonnes of newsprint paper is manufactured in India and the remaining 0.8 million tonne is imported.

India imports about two million tonnes of pulp (soft wood and hardwood) and waste paper (sack waste for unbleached grades, envelopes waste, cup stock for white grades and magazine waste) for newsprint.

Indian paper industry can be more competitive by adding improvements of key ports, roads and Indian railways and communication facilities, revision of forest policy is required for wood based paper industry so that plantation can be raised by industry, cooperatives of farmers, and state government. Degraded forest land should be made available to the industry for raising plantations.Import duty on waste paper should be reduced,Duty free imports of new & second hand machinery/equipment should be allowed for technology up gradation.

The paper industry in India looks extremely positive as the demand for upstream market of paper products, like, tissue paper, tea bags, filter paper, light weight online coated paper, medical grade coated paper, etc., is growing up.

The following prime grades of paper are imported from USA, Europe, Dubai and Singapore: label stock, wet strength papers, tea bag tissue, soft tissue, filter paper, insulation kraft, extensible kraft, decorative laminates, overlay tissue, thermal papers, digital papers, coated papers/boards and some specialities. Stock lots of all grades totaling about 200,000 tonnes arrive every year mostly from USA and Europe. These are imported by traders in major metro cities of Mumbai, Chennai, Cochin, Bengaluru and Delhi.

India has surplus to export some grades. It exports following grades of papers to Middle East, South Eastern countries, Eastern Europe and USA:  A4 copiers, wood-free (mostly from bamboo and agro waste by several small mills), MG varieties (from small agro based mills), coated duplex (mostly recycled fibre) and large quantity of converted products like stationery items, calendars, books, magazines, children's play books and comics.

Major issues confronting India's pulp and paper industry are high cost of production caused by inadequate availability and high cost of raw materials, power cost and concentration of mills in one particular area, non-availability of good-quality fibre, uneconomical plant size, technological obsolescence and environmental challenges, highlighted the ASSOCHAM paper.

The cost of wood to Indian players is $50 per metric tonne compared to around $30 internationally. While issues related to technology, capacity and environment come directly under the purview of companies, raw material shortage is a disadvantage affecting all domestic companies.

There are not many mills that have integrated wet-end systems in the overall control strategy. The paper mill, is the formative stage in a paper making process and any forward control strategy results in impressive gains in terms of quality. Likewise, energy, being the significant portion of production cost, is getting less attention in terms of monitoring the overall consumption of power across various sections of the plant.

Integration of electrical systems, including intelligent motor control centres with mill distributed control systems (DCS), will help in monitoring the overall energy consumption. Another area is integration of raw material flow information on realtime basis and utilising the same to effectively control the quality at various stages.

Enterprise solutions, such as enterprise resource planning systems, manufacturing execution systems or collaborative production management systems, and supply chain management systems have not received adequate attention from the paper industry management. Also there exists a lack of coordination between the automation department and IT within the mill. As a result, the pulp and paper industry in India lags behind its Asian and global counterparts.

Collaborative production management systems will improve the mill management and business systems radically. Quality control labs with statistical models can be linked to give advantage to both production and quality control personnel. Dealers and end users can track their orders as the product moves through various stages of production. Businesses will not survive with just traditional automation systems. Only integrated automation and enterprise systems will enable these industries to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.

 

About the Author

Essentially, there is a huge potential for automation and system integrators to work collaboratively with India's pulp and paper companies and help them acquire the competitive edge. This means paper mills in India have tremendous opportunity to improve their profit margin by increasing their investments in automation systems and enterprise solutions, and integrating them to achieve collaborative production management. With the country's economy growing robustly, the paper consumption in India is bound to expand, and the existing gap is a good indicator of the industry's growth potential.

Can I use wax paper instead of cookie dough paper for making cookies?

I am making cookies and I need a cookie sheet to put the cookie dough on before baking, but I don't have that. Can I use wax paper instead? 10 points for the best answer.

You can't use wax paper in the oven. Wax paper has wax on it (which melts). Just take a long length of tin foil and fold it so it's a few layers, then use that as a cookie sheet. It will be more difficult to get the cookies out of the oven, but it'll work in a pinch.

Demo - 4th Grade Paper Making

Tags: art, design, fun, origami, paper, paper making, paper making for kids, paper making kit, paper making process, papermaking supplies

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at 8:23 pm and is filed under scrapbooking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.