On Thursday, March 20, the process class visited the Glatfelter Plant located in Chillicothe, Ohio. Glatfelter is one of the world's leading manufacturers of specialty paper and technical products. The company was founded by Philip Glatfelter in 1864 and achieved annual sales of $1.19 billion. The company's headquarters are located in York, Pennsylvania, with paper manufacturing plants and lumberyards located throughout the United States. Glatfelter also operates internationally in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Canada and the Philippines. The Chillicothe mill is a pulp and paper manufacturing plant. Essentially it is two mills in one as pulp and paper production are sometimes separate. The papermaking process begins with pulp. Pulp is cellulosic fibrous material extracted from the cellulosic fiber of wood. Glatfelter uses the Kraft process to produce both hardwood and softwood pulps. Hardwood pulps are made from oak, beech, poplar, birch and eucalyptus. They have short fibers with an average length of 1 millimeter. The main purpose of hardwoods is for the paper to achieve bulkiness, smoothness and opacity. Softwood, on the other hand, is obtained from pine and spruce with a fiber length of an average of 3 millimeters, which provides additional resistance to the paper. Both softwood and hardwood are produced independently of each other and are mixed in the desired proportion in the paper mill. The process starts with wood chips. Trees are chipped to produce wood chips that are half an inch to an inch long and up to two-fifths inches thick. The chips are fed into a digester, which creates a chemical reaction with the cooking liquid, which delignifies the wood. Cooking liquor is made from black and white liquor. White liquor is mainly composed of sodium hydro...... half the paper ...... recycle used chemicals to be reused. The pulp mill would not generate any income without the waste system. In the paper mill the problem is the supply of wood pulp. Glatfelter mentioned pulp shortages and purchased pulp from outside sources, which would be considered more expensive than producing it. The paper machine runs continuously and closure is avoided at all costs as closure would mean the plant would lose money at a rate of $12,000 per hour. Paper production will always be an industry. There is no better substitute than paper. Some may argue that digital technology will eventually make paper unusable, but as technology advances, something must remain non-digital. Paper leaves a legacy in writing, digital data can be erased, and paper can burn, but paper has survived and will continue to survive just as it has survived for a long time.