Reply To: Empire Paper Mills (Greenhithe)

I used to visit Empire Paper Mill in the late 1960s and early 1970s when I worked for Reed Engineering and Development in Aylesford.

One of the projects was to try to reduce water consumption as the mill was faced with installing effluent treatment, presumably as the Control of Pollution Act 1974 was looming.  Water had never been lacking so was used widely and unnecessarily in many places.

A major task was to generate the first map of where the water was used and water and fibre lost. This involved hunting around the sub-basement for pipes coming from above and taking samples. The sub-basement was an other-worldly place. Low ceilinged, with not many lights, the water was supposed to flow in open V-shaped channels but these had over flowed many times, leaving swamps of pulp rotting away with piles of writhing red worms on the surface. There was one guy, who was reputed to live down there, tasked with reporting major losses and generally keeping the loses “out of sight and out of mind”.

Many flows were hard to measure so we did a lot of tracer studies using lithium or potassium chloride or fluorescent dyes. The mill ran a three-shift system, running Monday to Saturday night and It quickly became apparent that the weekly shut would be critical to any effluent control. However, this had to be quantified, so our team were co-opted to getting to the mill on Saturday nights between 9 and midnight to catch the flood of discharges at shut-down.

A bit damaging to my social life but even more frustrating as several times we turned up at the mill only to be told at the gates – “sorry you missed it – x machine threw a felt so they shut early”.  There was an element of danger too. On one occasion, Chris Wilson (the Department Head, later Group Technical Director St Regis Group) who was setting a good example by being part of the team, was nearly drowned when the water level in the sub-basement quickly reached the roof nearly trapping him. He rushed to the entrance ladder with water coming up his body.

Later, visiting Empire was part of my duties doing press monitoring and troubleshooting. I would go to most of the Reed mills, the Kent ones more frequently than the Northern ones. Main duty was testing felt moisture contents using the Scanpro and then adjusting until the profiles were optimised for each position. Kit was heavy so it was great weight-training as well as stimulating.