For the second year in a row, PAPTAC’s annual Paperweek/BIOFOR conference was held virtually. Last year’s virtual format hosted on Microsoft Teams resulted in very high attendance by mill personnel and this year was no different – out of 969 registrants, 741 were from paper companies.

A few years ago I was at a roadside viewpoint in Utah looking at a slope covered with poplar trees  whose leaves were starting to turn yellow in the cold October air. An interpretive panel pointed out that while different shades of yellow could be seen in different groups of trees, all of the trees in each grouping were exactly the same shade of yellow.

The 2021 Nobel prize for chemistry was awarded to Benjamin List and David MacMillan, who independently discovered organocatalysts about 20 years ago.

Some children are reluctant students of mathematics; they’re not interested in learning equations they don’t think they’ll ever have a use for. I find there’s something magical, however, in plugging numbers into an equation and coming up with an answer – like solving a puzzle!

In his book published in early 2021, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster”, Bill Gates points out that the world is currently adding 51 billion tons per year of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and needs to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 in order to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting the increase in global temperature by only 1.5 °C.

In a recent blog post, I discussed the importance of using the scientific method in evaluating new products. My historical reference to the origins of the term “snake oil” provoked some interesting reactions, but it was a device to attract the attention of readers, and apparently it worked!

The use of “snake oil” as a derogatory phrase traces back to the late 1800s when "patent medicines" were often peddled by travelling salesman or on the back pages of newspapers, promising to cure a wide variety of ailments, with little proof of their curative powers.

As everyone knows, it’s difficult to manage a process if you can’t measure it. This is particularly true of energy management in a pulp and paper mill, especially when dealing with steam flow meters, which are notorious for sometimes giving inaccurate measurements.

The colour green is associated with many things, including jealousy and inexperience. But for most of us the first association is probably “natural”. This is the idea behind “green chemistry”, which is a concept that has first developed about thirty years ago.

The world has changed in the last few weeks due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Those of us who live in a city are dealing with the lockdown by working from home and only emerging to exercise and buy groceries. But what’s it like for large companies operating production facilities in the forest products industry?

Resolute Forest Products recently announced a $27 million investment to build a 21 tonne per day cellulose filaments plant at its Kénogami paper mill, to start up in 2021.

If you’ve worked for more than one employer in your career, or even for the same company under different leaders, you’ll be very aware that when goals are not very well defined, productivity can suffer, and you and your colleagues could even be working at cross-purposes.

Last year I had the experience of driving along the east coast of South Africa north of Durban. For most of the journey, the surrounding land had rather scrubby vegetation: widely-spaced bushes.

There are two good reasons why the world should be focused on reducing carbon footprint. The first, obviously, is to slow the effects of global warming and the drastic consequences it has for the planet’s future. The second reason, sometimes forgotten or ignored, is that non-renewable or fossil resources will run out, possibly as soon as 2060. 

The crash earlier this year of an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max that took the lives of all passengers and crew aboard appears to have been caused by the combination of an angle-of-attack sensor that was sending an incorrect signal and control software that reacted to this signal, not allowing the pilot to override it.

A sign at my local courier office seems to claim that there is a shortage of robots to replace humans. In fact, the situation is the reverse. Currently in North America, in many industries, there is a shortage of humans to carry out jobs that cannot be automated.

The movie Black Panther uses the premise that a small nation in Africa is well ahead of the rest of the world in developing new technologies.

I had the opportunity last fall to visit the Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt. Of the original seven wonders of the ancient world, they are the only one remaining.

Whenever I see an actor on television or movies at the wheel of a car talking with a front seat passenger I cringe when the driver isn’t paying attention to the road in front of him.

If you're working in the forest products industry you've probably had a similar experience to this.

Marketers are always coming up with new names for improved products, but it seems they don't expect their customers to be able to count higher than five.