Day 7 - Paper and Bus

On Day 7 of this adventure, we departed Nanjing and traveled to the APP Gold East paper mill in Zhenjiang. This is a very large and very modern papermaking operation. Here are photos of the sample room in their office complex -- quite impressive! Also include is a photo of the students looking at a model of the huge, parallel-line complex.

Here's our group photo out front of the main office.

This mill features the world's largest and most modern coated free sheet paper machine, which started up in 2005. It has a forming width of 9.77 meters and a top speed of 2000 meters/minute. This machine is amazing -- it features a gap former, twin shoe presses, single tier drying section, speed sizer, on-machine blade coater (2 sides), and a Janus inclined calender stack. 3000 tons per day from one machine!!!! This baby is 400 meters long!!!! It was great for the students to see a benchmark for modern papermaking. What also impressed us was the the cleanliness of the area.

As was true for the first mill we visited, the people from Gold East were eager to show us their effluent treatment and discharge area. They took us out to their "effluent pagoda," which featured a pond and waterfall. This photo shows the students feeding goldfish in the pond. The mill has a COD level well under the provencial limit.

Our tour was conducted by Roy Wang, an NCSU graduate student from 1986. It was another multi-course feast, with yet another giant steamed fish.


What ensued next was not so pleasant. We were unable to secure an adequate number of overnight train tickets for our next destination (Guangdong provence), so Dr. Chang had arranged for our tour bus to drive us 8 HOURS over land. I don't know if you have been on one of these small buses before, but they don't have a lot of leg room...and they don't have a toilet. So we were smooshed up together in a pretty uncomfortable situation. Here is a photo of us on this trip....

One highlight was when we stopped at a pretty sketchy truck stop for dinner. Most students opted out of the mystery-meat buffet and chose pre-packaged noodles instead. But they were flabbergasted when they had to go all the way around back to a strange little shed and open a valve to get hot water. My oh my...

Our destination was the Tralin paper mill. The mill owns the large hotel we were staying at. It was not bad, but you could tell the staff was not accustomed to seeing this many Caucasians at once. My room looked like it was ready for a Central Party meeting, complete with green fake leather chairs and not one bit of adornment.

All in all...an interesting but exhausting day.