Verso Paper Sartell Mill
[1] The original company, Watab Pulp and Paper, was conceived by a group of lumbermen from Wisconsin and Michigan and was formed on May 10, 1905 with a capitalization of $200,000.
Watab Pulp and Paper went further upstream, to Sartell, and for a sum of $1.00 made an agreement with the owners of the existing saw mill to move it from the west side of the Mississippi River to a point just inside the village limits.
The company then produced newsprint until 1930, when the conversion to groundwood book and magazine papers began.
Many changes have taken place since the days when log drives down the Mississippi River were common and the paper mill was experimenting using corn stalks as a raw material.
Large unloading crews handled the wood from railroad cars to a system of conveyors for building huge storage piles on the river’s edge.
Over the years, many changes had taken place with the mill’s machinery: Another operation that is no longer performed relates to storing groundwood.
In the past twenty years, basis weight of these papers has been reduced from a 43-pound sheet that was used in Family Circle magazine to, in some instances, as low as 26 pound.
St. Regis was one of the first companies in the area to install equipment for fly ash removal and wastewater treatment facilities.
Sartell won an Izaak Walton League award for clean water related to these efforts.
The mill has also been commended seven times by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency since 1985 for excellent wastewater treatment facility operation and effluent quality.
The mill has also been a pioneer in burning bark and wastewater sludge, very significant with the solid waste considerations of today.
3 paper machine project of 1982 is referred to as an expansion, it consisted almost of an entire mill replacement or rebuild.
April 2000 brought an upgraded gap former installation, including a headbox which was replaced and updated with new dilution control technology.
Each line is designed to produce 100 cords per shift of high quality, bark-free chips.
Equipment has been added for log washing and deicing prior to the drum to facilitate debarking.
After debarking, the wood flows through a log inspection and sorting system where individual sticks may be recycled to the drum.
The TMP pulp discharged from the tertiary refiner is treated for latency removal, series screened, cleaned, thickened, and stored in two medium density storage tanks.
Fork trucks deliver a six-bale stack to bale handling equipment for destacking and dewiring.
Coating ingredients are mixed in a slurry makedown tank, screened, and pumped continuously through various stages for enzyme addition and cooking.
A gap former was chosen to improve sheet formation and paper quality essential to raw stock manufacture.
The two-roll machine calender is equipped with two variable crown rolls and heating capability for caliper control.
The supercalenders impart a smooth, glossy finish to the paper’s surface, improving appearance and print quality.
The paper is wound onto individual rolls on a Jagenberg vari-top single drum winder.
The boiler is designed to burn a combination of coal, bark, wastewater sludge, and tire chips.
The mill uses and returns (cleaner than the river itself) ten million gallons of water per day.
An activated sludge aeration basin with secondary clarifier is used for BOD reduction before discharge to the Mississippi River.
Many computer based systems work together to account for and to improve the quality of mill products.
