Mill Closures Research Articles

Sentiments toward use of forest biomass for heat and power in canadian headlines

Replacement of fossil fuels with bioenergy, often in concert with carbon capture and storage, plays an important role in published low-emission pathways from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other agencies. National and regional net-zero greenhouse gas emission commitments have caused a dramatic increase in forest biomass consumption globally, and the rise has been accompanied by debates in the scholarly literature and in society at large about the ecological and climate change impacts of forest biomass. This paper presents a quantitative analysis of media headlines about forest bioenergy published in 75 Canadian newspapers from 2010 to 2020. Using a lexicon and rules-based sentiment analysis tool, we explore negative and positive media headlines about forest biomass. Despite our finding that Canadian headlines about forest bioenergy were twice as likely to be positive as negative, media items document reversals away from forest biomass-generated domestic electricity. Our analysis found that increases in electricity costs following the introduction of forest biomass as a fuel type for Canadian electricity generation was a primary cause of these reversals. Headlines also critiqued the expanded production of wood pellets, citing forest ecological impacts and the debate about the net carbon impacts of forest biomass-generated energy. Safety issues, including stories about workplace injuries, and pellet plant fires, and economic issues, such as fiber supply and mill closures, were also featured. This research contributes a social science lens to understand perceptions over time about forest biomass for heat and power.

Measuring industrial lumber production using nighttime lights: A focus study on lumber mills in British Columbia, Canada.

Nighttime lights (NTL) are the procurement of remotely sensed artificial illumination from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) satellite. NTL provides a unique perspective on anthropogenic activity by characterizing spatial and temporal patterns related to economic trends and human development. In this study, we assess the ability of NTL to characterize trends associated with industrial lumber production in British Columbia, Canada. We establish the presence of a logarithmic relationship between NTL and lumber mill production capacity (R2 = 0.69–0.82). The ability of NTL to temporally identify mill closures is then demonstrated by differentiating pairs of active and closed mills. We also identify Granger causality and co-integration between NTL and monthly lumber production, highlighting the predictive capability of NTL to forecast production. We then utilize this relationship to build linear regression models that utilize NTL data to estimate monthly (R2 = 0.33), quarterly (R2 = 0.58), and annual (R2 = 0.90) lumber production without reported data.

New genres and obsolete expertise in the new textiles economy

ABSTRACT This paper examines the role of distinctions between genres in conflicts over expertise in an American textile mill. Riverway is a struggling 150-year-old New England textile mill where members of a diverse workforce focus on producing high quality fabric in a context that demands daily adaptive expertise. Based on fieldwork from 2015–19, we examine how Riverway workers interacted with documentation systems at the mill. They engaged with managers and coworkers around new forms of technology and shifting valuations about skill and expertise, and, in the process, made sense of their roles as workers in a declining industry where their skills and forms of expertise were nearly obsolete. Through analysis of conflicts in the mill, we examine how members of the mill's community of practice made sense of a changing genre ecology of tools for communicating, recording information, communicating asynchronously, and asserting expertise. We show how technologies for making fabric and communicating about fabric production became symbols of valuations tangentially linked to production. These technologies became lightning rods for debates about expertise, skill, and knowledge, and for everyday distinctions that workers and managers made about the value of their work during a time of economic change marked by mill closures.

Comparison of Ontario’s roundwood and recycled fibre pulp and paper mills’ performance using data Envelopment analysis

The pulp and paper industry converts roundwood and recycled fibre, collected from wastepaper into printing and writing papers, and other specialty grades of paper. The pulp and paper mills in Ontario have been facing extreme competitive pressures, which have affected their performance leading to several mill closures. The purpose of this study is to evaluate and compare the relative performance of three types of Ontario's pulp and paper mills (using all fibre, only roundwood fibre, and only recycled fibre). This study uses bootstrap data envelopment analysis in analyzing and comparing the operational efficiency of the Ontario's pulp and paper mills, with 224 sample data observations over a period of 17 years. The results indicate low levels of overall technical and managerial efficiencies in the pulp and paper mills using recycled fibre. The results of the study highlight that the pulp and paper industry needs to divert their attention to streamlining the manufacturing processes, reducing costs, improving raw material usage, and making capital investments in the new and improved technology, in order to improve the operational efficiency and competitiveness of the Ontario's pulp and paper mills. The pulp and paper mills using recycled fibre require huge capital investments, especially for installing the latest de-inking technology. The results of this study provide policy makers with detailed performance analysis so that future input resources can be reallocated to improve the performance of the pulp and paper mills in Ontario.

Squire’s Own: A Tribute to Donald Hurrelbrink and the Warren Junior Military Band

Squire’s OwnA Tribute to Donald Hurrelbrink and the Warren Junior Military Band Nancy L. Glen (bio) This story has two beginnings. The birth of Donald W. Hurrelbrink and his love of music is one. The other is the development of a band program at St. Mary’s School in Warren, Ohio. The way these events coincided, and the legendary history of this band, is the focus of this tribute. It has turned out to be a warm story of achievement, love, and devotion, experienced by hundreds of individuals through one man’s dedication, which shaped a music ensemble lasting from 1927 until 2010. This story is set in the context of this midsized city in the northeastern part of Ohio. The area is best known for its manufacturing and steel industry, including the origin of the Packard Motor Car in the early twentieth century and a robust steel industry, both of which bolstered its growing economy. Its highest population reached 63,494 in 1970. It is well known for producing some highly accomplished public figures, film industry luminaries, professional athletes,1 and a world-class summer theater program, which brought celebrities from all over the United States to perform there. Unfortunately, the collapse of the steel industry in the 1970s devastated the economies of Warren and nearby [End Page 61] Youngstown. On September 9, 1977, “Black Monday” announced the beginning of local steel mill closures, with the loss of over 5,000 jobs,2 which sent economic and social conditions in Warren on a downward spiral from which it is still struggling to recover. Warren’s population has now dropped to an estimated 38,382,3 with high unemployment and crime rates. An amazing facet of Hurrelbrink and the band’s story is that it managed to grow and persist through much of this change, which makes it a unique accomplishment in an otherwise declining community. Dr. Michael Westmoreland comments on why the band maintained its popularity during the years of the economic collapse in the Warren and Youngstown area: Here is my view as why the Warren Junior Military Band was popular during the time of the steel industry collapse and economic depression in the Mahoning Valley. Patriotism at that time was very different than it is now. Having personally marched in the Fourth of July parades in Canfield and Austintown, I remember there being a large turnout of people cheering as the various parade units would march by. Also, as a member of the W. D. Packard Concert Band, I saw many people attend the annual Fourth of July concert at Packard Park. People loved to see the band and to be entertained. The Warren Junior Military Band was truly a “show band” in that it could do concert, parade, and field show all in one setting. I think these various performances allowed people to escape the worries of a job loss and a failing economy.4 The information for this article was obtained through email and telephone conversations with Hurrelbrink’s daughter, Janne.5 These were followed by a trip to Warren, Ohio, to visit the archives where the history of the band and Hurrelbrink’s life story are preserved by a small but dedicated group of band alumni. Their stories reflect wonderful memories of the band and its history. [End Page 62] Such a program would be difficult to duplicate today in an arena where young people’s and their parents’ lives are often overscheduled, and selflessness may not always be valued. Visits with former band members during a trip to Warren left me in awe of the impact their experiences in the band, under Hurrelbrink’s leadership, had made on their lives. The care with which they continue to preserve the band’s archival materials and the lifelong friendships this band has produced are inspiring. squire Donald Hurrelbrink was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1909. He learned to play violin at age eight and French horn at age 12, and he continued to develop his love of music as he finished his public school education at Libbey High School in Toledo. There he played in several musical ensembles and served as drum major...

Evaluating New York raw fiber-to-retail

Inspired by the slow fashion movement, this is an exploratory case study focused on New York’s raw fiber-to-retail value chain for local clothing and textiles. New York has over 470 diverse sheep, alpaca, goat farms, fiber processing mills for product development, and fiber festivals for retail. A survey with farmers presents their motives for establishing a fiber farm business, diverse fibers available, fiber products, income, and their multiple retail venues. Interviews were conducted with farmers, fiber mill owners, and artisan designers. Primary research objectives included: (1) determining how fiber farms, mills, artisans, fiber festivals, and fiber agro-tourism intersect to sustain the current fiber community; (2) evaluating the major challenges the fiber community faces; (3) determining if stakeholders of the fiber community have benefited from any policies; and (4) understanding future goals New York raw fiber-to-fashion stakeholders have to sustain the local fiber community. Interviews reveal several leadership initiatives developed by fiber farmers to address challenges of finding a market, limited income, and fiber mill closures. This study uses the five key dimensions of slow fashion as a framework to evaluate New York raw fiber-to-retail.

Impact of Structural Changes on Energy Efficiency of Finnish Pulp and Paper Industry

A key challenge in prevention of global warming is how to increase energy efficiency, to be able to deal with increased fossil CO2 emissions from rising energy usage. Increasing energy efficiency will decrease energy usage and is in a key role in emission mitigation. The focus is the pulp and paper industry, which is energy-intensive. Development of industrial energy efficiency has been studied before but the role of industrial transformation is still mostly unknown. The knowledge must be improved, to be able to predict future developments in the most effective way. In this research, impact of various production unit closures and start-ups on energy efficiency of the Finnish pulp and paper industry were studied utilizing statistical analysis. Results indicate that about 20% of the Finnish pulp and paper industry energy efficiency improvement between 2011 and 2017 is caused by the major structural changes. The rest, 80% of the progress, was mainly due to improved technology and more optimal operational modes. Additional findings suggest that modern mill start-ups have a significantly greater potential to reduce energy consumption than old mill closures.

Toxic releases from an industry in decline: Environmental trends in Maine's pulp and paper sector

AbstractHistorically, the pulp and paper industry has been a cornerstone of Maine's economy, but it is also a major generator of pollution to the state's air and waterways. The industry has been in decline for several decades, with the most recent period of economic turmoil taking place in the aftermath of the Great Recession. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, pulp and paper manufacturing is among the top sources of the release of toxic chemicals. Hence, one might expect that as the sector declines, the by‐production of toxic pollution from pulp and paper mills would also decline. However, a comparison of the mills’ releases of seven major toxic chemicals in the year immediately before—2010—and the year immediately after—2016—the latest round of mill closures, shows that the absolute quantities of industrial releases of some toxic chemicals remained steady or increased over the amounts released in the precrisis period. More encouragingly, in the latter period, a greater portion of releases of toxic chemicals were managed in ways other than direct discharge to air and water.

Impacts of Recent Mill Closures and Potential Biofuels Development on Maine’s Forest Products Industry

The economic contributions of a sector (i.e., employment, output, value added) are a measure of how money from that sector moves about a regional economy. Using 2014 estimates of economic contributions from the forest product industry in Maine, we estimate the 2016 contribution by considering the impacts from several recent mill closures (five pulp/paper, two bioelectric). The loss of these mills, particularly paper mills, reduces the economic contributions of the forest products industry relative to the state economy and distorts markets for low-value wood. We also explore a prospective opportunity to revive low-value wood markets by modeling the economic impacts from a hypothetical colocated biorefinery, where wood chips are turned into advanced fuels and chemical coproducts. The dollar value of economic impacts from such an investment are small relative to the total industry, but they may prove significant for some rural communities.

Decline in the Pulp and Paper Industry: Effects on Backward-Linked Forest Industries and Local Economies

Abstract Pulp, paper, and paperboard mills consume close to 52 percent of southern roundwood, providing a significant market to southern forest landowners. Declining numbers of pulpwood-using mills and downward trends in mill capacity, however, present a growing challenge to the southern forest sector. Shrinking mill capacity affects rural communities that depend on mill demand for labor and other production inputs. This study investigates the effect of pulp mill closures on the regional and local economy, focusing on the spillover effects to forestry and forest products industry. Multiregional input–output models were built for two mill closures using Impact Analysis for Planning (IMPLAN) showing linkages among different sectors, households, and governments in the regional economy. Results revealed the different effects across wood procuring zones with areas displaying significant loss in logging activity. Significance to other forestry-related industries depended on closed mills' inputs. We compared our results with information available in the literature regarding expected economic impact from a wood pellet mill, an alternative market for small-size wood. We expect research results will provide valuable information to policymakers and managers when addressing likely future changes in the paper manufacturing industry.

Building a comprehensive mill-level database for the Industrial Sectors Integrated Solutions (ISIS) model of the U.S. pulp and paper sector.

Air emissions from the U.S. pulp and paper sector have been federally regulated since 1978; however, regulations are periodically reviewed and revised to improve efficiency and effectiveness of existing emission standards. The Industrial Sectors Integrated Solutions (ISIS) model for the pulp and paper sector is currently under development at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and can be utilized to facilitate multi-pollutant, sector-based analyses that are performed in conjunction with regulatory development. The model utilizes a multi-sector, multi-product dynamic linear modeling framework that evaluates the economic impact of emission reduction strategies for multiple air pollutants. The ISIS model considers facility-level economic, environmental, and technical parameters, as well as sector-level market data, to estimate the impacts of environmental regulations on the pulp and paper industry. Specifically, the model can be used to estimate U.S. and global market impacts of new or more stringent air regulations, such as impacts on product price, exports and imports, market demands, capital investment, and mill closures. One major challenge to developing a representative model is the need for an extensive amount of data. This article discusses the collection and processing of data for use in the model, as well as the methods used for building the ISIS pulp and paper database that facilitates the required analyses to support the air quality management of the pulp and paper sector.

‘Go Left, Young Writer’: John Cheever and the Writing of ‘Fall River’, 1931

In late 1931, John Cheever temporarily stopped producing work for large-circulation magazines and began writing formally and stylistically experimental stories for various little magazines. This article examines the first of these stories, ‘Fall River’, an ostensibly proletarian story about mill closures and mass lay-offs in an economically depressed textile city. Cheever published ‘Fall River’ in the second issue of The Left: A Quarterly Review of Radical and Experimental Art, a communist little magazine published in Davenport, Iowa, in late 1931. Cheever's most recent biographer, Blake Bailey, claims that the author's turn away from the large-circulation magazine marketplace towards an emergent Midwestern literary radicalism in 1931 was a short-lived political digression by an otherwise apolitical middle-class writer. This article contests this view. Re-evaluating Cheever's professional relationship with the New Republic (the first large-circulation magazine to publish his fiction), his personal experience of left-wing politics and his reading of little magazines between 1930 and 1931, it argues that Cheever made this decision for professionally pragmatic, rather than political, reasons. In short, it was easier for Cheever to publish his work in little magazines in the early 1930s because they were more receptive to the work of younger writers than were their mainstream counterparts. This is not to say that ‘Fall River’ was not an apolitical story, however. The article argues further that, far from being a political digression, ‘Fall River’ is in fact a self-reflexive critique of the politicisation of middle-class writers during the Depression. It uses close analysis of the text to demonstrate the extent to which Cheever's ambivalent relationship with American communism influenced some of the formal, generic, and thematic properties of the story.

Place Systems and Social Resilience: A Framework for Understanding Place in Social Adaptation, Resilience, and Transformation

This article proposes a three-part framework for accounting for the physical and social components of place as a system in community adaptation to crisis. While ideas of place have been incorporated into research on social and community resilience and adaptation, the existing work tends to focus on sense of place or place attachment. Generally, it does not account for the roles of place character or infrastructure. This article develops a novel three-part framework—incarnate, discarnate, and chimerical place—to provide a richer description of how place acts a system to inform social adaptation to crises, and specifically how it informs community resilience or transformation. This framework is demonstrated through case studies of two forest-dependent communities in British Columbia, Canada, adapting to local mill closures.

Sentimental Capitalism in Contemporary India: Art, Heritage, and Development in Ahmedabad, Gujarat

AbstractUsing a critical cultural politics approach and deploying the concept of sentimental capitalism, this article problematizes the burgeoning creative economy discourse while analyzing spaces of art and heritage production in Ahmedabad, India. I situate the Cotton Exchange exhibit (April 2013) in an erstwhile mill in recent histories of mill closures, genocide, creative economy initiatives and development aspirations of revitalizing degraded space. I argue that in remaking place, art mobilizes sentiments—here, nostalgia and hope—while erasing violence and inequality. Sentimental capitalism is at work in the exhibition by mobilizing artisans as entrepreneurial agents not victims of capitalism; constructing art's aura of grassroots participation and artisanal empowerment while obscuring displacement and exploitation; and fostering cult‐like regard for art's intrinsic and instrumental value as non‐profit and its capacity to engender opportunity, recognition, and even property. While another spatial politics is possible, in Ahmedabad today, art is being mobilized to obscure dispossession and exploitation in the name of urban revitalization and heritage production.

An Examination of Michigan's Logging Sector in the Emerging Bioenergy Market

Logging firms, as suppliers of raw material, form an important part of Michigan's forest products industry. Given the increasing interest in wood-based bioenergy production, their role has become increasingly important. For this study, we used a mail survey of Michigan's logging firms to provide an outlook of the logging sector within the state. The aim was to understand the status of existing logging businesses and to explore their potential role in the woody biomass supply chain. Our findings reveal that the state's logging firms have been facing difficulty in retaining their business and in running operations profitably in recent years. Mill closures in the past decade have had significant negative impacts on half of the responding firms. Given this situation, the introduction of wood-to-energy facilities could provide new market opportunities for logging firms in the state. Loggers in general were found to be supportive of introducing such facilities in their wood basket. Availability of timber to meet the feedstock demands of new and existing facilities could, however, become a challenging issue in the future. Insufficient timber sales and high stumpage prices were identified as the major barriers to increased harvesting by the logging firms in our survey. On average, the responding firms reported that in the majority (83%) of their logging jobs, they leave logging residues on site, suggesting that there is little or no market for such materials at present. This could change, however, with market development and improvement in the logging and transportation facilities in the future.

Effective pollution control policy for China

China began enforcing a system of pollution levies in 1982. However, senior environmental officials expressed doubt that this system was improving the environment and, in 1996, they began to place greater reliance on mill closure as the penalty for poor environmental performance. Since then, managers have found means of subverting many of the intended mill closures, and this causes us to return to the question of the abatement efficiency and effectiveness of the levies. This paper uses production evidence from 34 papermills in two representative provinces to examine the abatement efficiency and effectiveness of the levies. The paper industry is an important industry for this question because it is the largest polluter of China’s rural environment. We use a distance function to determine individual output-based and revenue-based shadow prices for each mill during the years that the levies were the main environmental incentive. The output-based shadow prices for pollutants display no recognizable trends over time and they are very different for firms in different locations. The revenue-based shadow prices are widely variable between mills and locations as well. These findings indicate that the marginal opportunity costs of abatement were also widely divergent and that there was no trend toward improved abatement efficiency. The way to correct this is to improve the performance of the market—not to reject the market altogether as the more recent reliance on mill closures does. This observation suggests that a system of tradable permits would be an improvement on relatively less successful administrative measures such as forced mill closures.

Industry- and company-level factors influencing the development of the forest energy business — insights from a Delphi Study

The global business environment of today requires industries to be increasingly agile in order to create added value. There is a particularly urgent need to innovate and redefine business models in the mature pulp and paper industry, which is continually announcing mill closures and reporting persistent profitability problems. This paper focuses on the emerging forest energy business, which appears to offer many novel opportunities for both the forest and the energy industry. We conducted a qualitative dissensus-based online Delphi study and carried out themed expert interviews in order to identify the main industry- and company-level factors that are most likely to influence the bioenergy sector, its value-creation potential and forest and energy companies' future roles in it. The Delphi technique proved to be a valuable research tool with which we were able to obtain comprehensive information on a subject that lacks historical and financial data, and yet requires input from many quarters. The results suggest that the complementary resources held by forest and energy companies make collaboration in the bioenergy business favorable. Moreover, the procurement and logistics of forest raw material appear to be key success factors in terms of yielding the most synergetic gains. Uncertainty about policy interventions nevertheless causes concern given their relatively rapid effect on the prospects of the bioenergy business.

Does the Canadian forest sector have a viable future? Is current forest management acceptable to the general public? Would you advise your kids to take forestry?

The forest sector in Canada is in the midst of some major changes, with mill closures and rationalization, major public reviews of Crown land management in several provinces, and declining enrollment in forestry programs across Canada and internationally. I will address the three questions in my title, provide some information, as well as my opinions regarding the answers (yes, no, and yes, respectively). Key words: forest industry competitiveness, public consultation, future directions of Crown land management, public perception, forestry enrollment

Protecting the Forests of New Brunswick Against "The Insect" – An Overview

In 1951, one pulp and paper company and the New Brunswick Government decided to try to prevent or at least lessen losses from the spruce budworm by aerial spraying of insecticide. Today, 33 years later, protection is still carried out, not with any thought to eradicating the pest, but rather to maintain the industrial base and the resulting employment. Without this protection, the forest products industry in New Brunswick would have suffered many mill closures – a catastrophe in a province where one job in seven depends on a healthy forest products industry.

IMPACT OF THE DECLINE OF RAW SILK ON TWO MAJOR COCOON-PRODUCING REGIONS IN JAPAN1

Both sericultural and manufacturing branches of Japan's once highly important raw silk industry suffered severe dislocations following peak production about 1930. World economic depression, synthetic fiber development, and World War II were fundamental causes. Reeling mill closures stemmed from bankruptcies, governmental readjustment programs, conversions into defense plants, bombings, and post-war business rationalization. Mulberry acreage shrank principally owing to wartime food shortages and profitable post-war alternatives, particularly orcharding. This paper contrasts changes observed in two of the most specialized Japanese cocoon-producing regions, Gumma Prefecture, on the Kanto lowlands where sweet potatoes and upland rice characteristically followed mulberry, and the Nagano Basin, representative of highland basins in central and northern Honshu, where orchards commonly replaced mulberry. Proportional losses in both reeling capacity, measured in number of reeling machines, and in mulberry acreage were above the national average in the Nagano Basin and below it in Gumma. Governmental policies and local factors caused these differences.