Kinleith Mill

Transcription

[Prince Charles] There was a very long and complicated system on the production line for producing paper, which at the end I think was going to be used for making bags to put cement in which then goes to China, as far as I could make out. But something didn't quite work and the paper wouldn't go onto the drums that spin 'round very fast, and we nearly all disappeared under a mountain [laughing] a mountain of what looked like very cheap brown lavatory paper [laughing]. [Narrator] Tokoroa is a timber town, with the nearby Kinleith pulp and paper mill being the town's largest employer. Though Tokoroa lies in one of New Zealand's prime dairy farming regions, when dairy farming was tried there, a mysterious disease called 'bush sickness' caused cattle to die. During the 1930s, 'bush sickness' was discovered to be caused by a lack of cobalt in the volcanic soil, so farmers added the mineral to fertiliser. But the pumice soil around Tokoroa is good for growing trees, and in the 1920s and '30s, several pine forests were planted. When these forests matured in the 1940s, the New Zealand Forest Products company began constructing a pulp and paper mill at Kinleith to process the wood. During the nineteenth century, manufacturing paper in New Zealand was difficult and unprofitable. Fibre, paper's essential raw material, was obtained from various combinations of rags, old shipping rope, used sacks, tussock grass, flax and waste paper. But flax and tussock grass proved unsuitable, and the local population was too small to produce enough waste. However, the timber from the pine forests that matured in the 1940s made excellent paper, and demand grew as the local economy expanded after the war. Scottish entrepreneur Sir David Henry set up the Kinleith mill eight kilometres south of Tokoroa, which is why many of the town's streets and suburbs have Scottish names. Kinleith was the name of Scottish mill where Henry worked as an apprentice. The mill was officially opened in 1954. The cost of building it was considerable, so it operated around the clock. Pulp and paper processing uses huge amounts of water, power and raw materials. In the early 1950s, the Kinleith mill used around 2,000 tonnes of logs, 200 tonnes of wood waste, over 60 million litres of water, 60 tonnes of coal and over 40 kilowatts of electricity every day. By the early 1960s, pulp and newsprint was being exported from New Zealand. From 1947, Tokoroa grew in order to house mill workers. The town was developed by New Zealand Forest Products rather than by the government. Between 1947 and 1976, the company built over 2,000 houses for workers. The company was actively involved in running the town, which was specially designed to attract and retain workers. But skilled workers and managers got better houses than unskilled workers, and single men were banished to camps on the outskirts of town in case they caused trouble. This segregation caused a lot of strife, and Tokoroa gained a reputation as a rough town. By 1981, nearly 19,000 people lived in Tokoroa. Some were assisted immigrants from Britain, the Netherlands, and the Pacific Islands. Maori also made up a large part of the population. Kinleith has a strong history of union membership. During the 1970s, there were several industrial disputes, culminating in a two-month strike over wages in 1980. The combined unions and mill management actually reached a settlement, but the government intervened and vetoed it. This prolonged the strike by another month, before the union demands were met. During the 1980s, New Zealand Forest Product's decision not to expand overseas, combined with poor trading conditions and industrial unrest, led to staff cutbacks. This saw Tokoroa's population fall to below 14,000 by 2006. Since 1990, when Kinleith was sold to Carter Holt Harvey, the mill has modernised. Pulp and paper mills can pollute water and air, so Kinleith's owners have introduced recycling, attempted to minimise waste and improved its treatment of effluent. In the mid-1990s, a new gas stripper system at the mill halved odour levels, reducing Kinleith's sulphurous smell.