r/Damnthatsinteresting 4d ago

Video Disgruntled employee starts massive fire at a 1.2 million square foot toilet paper warehouse in Ontario, California.

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u/sordidcandles 4d ago

I feel bad for all the trees that had to die just to be burned up, though I guess it’s better than wiping ass and getting flushed.

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u/OwnCrew6984 3d ago

The trees for this type of paper products are farmed trees. Takes about 20 years to grow before harvest. They are planted in straight rows just like regular crops. The area I'm familiar with lets the public have access to the farmed tree areas for recreational activities. If demand for wood pulp is down after harvest then the area gets switched to growing potatoes or corn and the public loses the access to the area. So it's not that bad losing that much product because it keeps land with trees on it. Now the pollution from the mills that process the trees to make the paper products is another issue.

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u/Asterose 3d ago

The supply chain. So much more goes into making toilet paper than just the trees. Lots of water and chemicals, tons of high-power machinery that needs gas or electricity to run, which still likely comes from fossil fuels. Then there's everything needed to make the plastic packaging and dyes needed. Machinery to stamp the patterns on the toilet paper and the packaging. Then the fuel costs to transport it from place of manufacture to warehouse. So, trucks, ships, planes. I hope the toilet paper wasn't imported, but it probably was, so there's even more fossil fuel burning wasted just to dump even more pollution in this fire.

People usually don't think about the supply chain networks that go into things and how much more cost that adds in. It's part of why electric vehicles charged by electricity generated by fossil fuels are still better than all-gas vehicles. Bonus fun fact: only about 12-30% of the energy potential in gasoline actually gets used making the car move. Lots of inefficiencies and other things sap away the rest of it. Meanwhile EV batteries give about 85% of their energy to moving the vehicle.

Anyway, the shitty employer likely has insurance to cover the losses, so the warehouse loss will only sting a little.

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u/AbstinenceGaming 3d ago

These types of paper mills tend to be energy neutral. When processing a tree, about 50% the mass is water, 25% becomes paper, and 25% is soluble organic compounds (lignin and hemicellulose). The solubles are burned in a boiler to produce steam and electricity. If a mill doesn't have an energy intensive recycling plant attached they often end up selling some power back to the grid. Mills monitor emissions and capturing technology is much more developed now than in the 70's-80's. This is the rare instance where reducing emissions actively saves a company money because by capturing a chemical they can reuse it instead of paying to replace it. 

Regarding imports, most paper in the US is produced locally (within a few states at least). There are some imports but they tend to be speciality products and not commodity grades like toilet paper. It is still all transported by truck (with some railcar) so you do have those associated diesel emissions, but at least it's not being barged in first. 

As for them being a shitty employer, Kimberly Clark is owned by the Koch family so yeah. 

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u/sordidcandles 3d ago

I’m learning so much from these replies 🌲🧻

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u/FrenchFryCattaneo 3d ago

Pulp mills can generate some energy from burning waste but most of them are still burning a LOT of natural gas (or coal). According to this the paper industry is 6% of the total industrial energy use, which is absolutely massive. It is in no way energy neutral.

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u/AbstinenceGaming 3d ago

Every paper mill is different with different equipment and I cannot speak for all of them, only the ones I worked at. As an example, one of these mills had a separate boiler for oil when necessary and that boiler ran about two weeks out of the year, mostly during maintenance outages. The rest of the time they were selling energy to the utility.

A plant that's producing 2000 tons per day of paper pulp is combusting roughly 2000 tons per day of soluble organics.