I work in an active Kraft Process paper mill (International Paper- Ticonderoga Mill, Ticonderoga NY). Here's the thing. we don't wear respirators. Because of the toxicity and just outright nastiness of the materials we encounter, we wear full-face Scott O-Vista gas masks with attached filters.
What people don't understand is that the back end of a paper mill is nothing but a chemical plant. To start off, the wood chips have to be 'cooked' in what is called a digester. This digester uses a highly caustic material called "white liquor" mixed with steam to cook the lignin out of the wood... all you want from the wood is the fiber. Now, this white liquor is made on site in the recausticization plant (Where I work, primarily). Now think of the digester as a 187-foot tall stomach. It's 'digesting' the lignin out of the wood. Once that white liquor has done it's job, it's now 'black liquor' and gets pumped from the pulp mill to the powerhouse, primarily the evaporator assemblies and then into the recovery boiler. Recovery boiler does just what it advertises; burns the lignin and fats that were digested out of the wood and becomes a superheated smelt which is then dumped into what we call the dissolving tank.
The dissolving tank is the fun part. Smelt that is 2100+F meets water and weak wash (it's a weak caustic solution). One of the jokes over in the powerhouse is that if you don't hear booming, RUN. Anyways, once the smelt meets the dissolving tank and the agitators beat the smelt blob back into a liquid, you have green liquor. This where I come in. The green liquor gets pumped to a clarifier where the burned up crap (dregs is our term for it) gets settled out and the clarified green liquor is pumped to a two storage tanks. (the dregs gets pumped as a slurry to the dregs filter, gets dried on the drum and out the door to the shit pad it goes). From the storage tanks, the green is pumped to what we call a slaker. Ever see a kool aid pitcher? Or make kool aid? Same principle. We add the green 5gallons for each speed point on the hot lime screw to make white liquor.
Now this is where I am going to talk about hazards, because this came up during the exploration of the old Domtar (now demolished) plant in Cornwall, Ontario. In the recaust plant alone, there are a myriad of things that even in a shutdown plant that will hurt you. First off, white liquor (sodium hydroxide) is a nasty caustic and will horribly burn you. I have two holes in my fingers, one on the left middle, one on the right ring from just one piece of caustic grit. It burned all the way to the bone. Just one speck of caustic sand. If you get this, even dried and crusty, in your eyes, you will be blinded. Why? If the plant is abandoned, or shut down, there is a good chance that the eyewash stations will not work. That's only way to get this shit off of you. When it meets your skin, it's slimy... that's because it's liquifying you. Enjoy. Green liquor, although not as nasty as white, is still a caustic and will still burn you. During operations, both liquors are well over 200F and not chemically, but thermally burn.
Second thing you will encounter in a just the recaust plant is the lime dust. It's on everything. It's in the air, it's on everything you touch. It reacts with sweat and slakes on your skin. The burns in causes look like and feel similar to sunburns. Luckily, the shit washes off, but until you do get it off, it's an itchy miserable burning sensation.
And lastly, gas. When caustic (NAOH) interacts with an acid (HCl for example), they react and give hydrogen sulfide, otherwise known as H2S in the industry. In low concentrations, it smells like a bad fart, or rotten eggs. In high concentrations, it numbs the sense of smell and kills with even a small breath of it. And I mean kills... INSTANTLY. As an aside, International Paper lost 12 people in a mill in Alabama a few years ago due to an H2S leak. None of them were wearing crickets (small H2S monitors) and none of the alarms worked. Anyways, the reason that this could be an issue in a closed or abandoned mill is that even those the caustic and acid sewers are separate, due to deterioration or just plain failure over time, the mechanisms that keep them separate could fail releasing H2S for someone to walk into.
Now moving over to the pulp mill, it's an entirely different set of chemicals that will kill you. Up until the mid-90's, pulp was bleached using vaporized chlorine (blue haze in normal room temperature atmosphere). Due to environmental constraints and technological advancements, most paper mills switched to chlorine dioxide as their bleaching agent. The catch with ClO2 was that it had to be made on-site as it was too volatile to be transported. Here's why... ClO2 is hot when it comes out of the chemical reactor and has to be instantly cooled via a chilling tower before it's injected into the pulp flow at the mixers. Most bleach plants run 5 or more pulp washers... they alternate caustic-acid/ClO20-caustic-ClO2/peroxide-ClO2/acid/OBA. All these chemicals are in a tank farm (usually). To make ClO2, you need 57% hydrogen peroxide, 93% sulfuric acid, methanol, and compressed air (I had to actually text a friend of mine at work for the ingredients as I have not worked the bleach plant for 3 years). Inject, let fizz, pump off and cool. Also, these plants sometimes run liquid oxygen as well. So beware that.
What does all this have to do with abandoned mills or which mask you should use? Simply, a paper mill even abandoned was once a chemical plant. Many of these chemicals just don't go away. Now if a mill was shut down quickly, many of the safety protocols may have been ignored, tanks not drained all the way, lines not valved off, or drained. If you must go into one of these places, this is what you should wear:
Rubber boots- you could be walking through shit that will eat through your sneakers of dissolve a pair of those swanky hipster boots. Preferably knee-length
Rubber/hylite/pvc gloves- again, you're going to be touching things that have funk on them. You touch a pipe that has spent acid on it, or caustic crust or lime dust and then rub your eye, you're going to be in a world of hurt.
jeans you don't care about- for obvious reasons
long sleeved shirt or better yet, a green welders jacket.
we have to wear hardhats, but for the casual explorer, that might be overkill.
Now WHAT YOU SHOULD HAVE BEFORE ENTERING AN ABANDONED/SHUT DOWN PAPER MILL:
H2S and ClO2 cricket and a good gas mask WITH A CANISTER RATED FOR EITHER GAS. we use Scott O-Vista's where I work. Basically this:
I apologize for the overly long lesson, but this is a place that should be respected and, to be honest, feared by someone who does not work there. my colleagues and I are somewhat blase about the risks and hazards because of our experience. I should post pictures of my forearms and hands... i have a series of nasty scars from all the times I have been burned, just collecting my samples for the testing round.
If you have any other questions or comments, you can either PM me, or post them here.
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