FEATURE: EDUCATION UPDATE
Pamsa Education and Training.
Cleaner Production Course.
by Iain Kerr
April has been quite a month. First we had to survive election fever with politicians running around and waving their manifestos around at fever pitch. Now we have to survive the H1N1 fever for which the poor Mexican swines have been apportioned most of the blame. Farmers are rebelling against the label swine flu because it’s putting people off their pork. In between all of the activity, we also had to survive four public holidays. Notwithstanding these national features of the month, we managed to squeeze in quite a bit of training and some research.
Training has been going at fever pitch around the country. Sixteen participants have successfully completed the Cleaner Production course, two of which were held in April. One of these courses was presented at the Sappi Technology centre in Pretoria, attended by Kimberly-Clark, Sappi , Nampak, and Tongaat Hulett Starch employees. The other was held in Cape Town at the Sappi Cape Kraft mill, attended by Nampak and Sappi employees. Incorporated into the course for the first time was a slot for Eskom to discuss the electricity supply situation in the country as well as the need for energy efficiency policy and practice implementation at our mills. It turns out that due to the economic downturn and the shutting of various industrial and mining operations, electricity consumption has dropped back to 2005 levels, so the heat is off, so to speak, for the short term. It is important, however, not to become complacent. I have heard from two reliable sources that the new Medupi power station, currently under construction, is two years behind schedule, so it is expected to come on line only in 2014. The situation remains dire for many years to come.
Also during our heady month of April, I hosted Professor Richard Venditti, a recycling expert who is the programme manager for the Pulp and Paper programme offered at North Carolina State University, in Raleigh, North Carolina. I was able to bring Richard out here, with the aid of a Fulbright Senior specialist grant, awarded by the Fulbright Program. Richard had a whirlwind tour of the recycling operations and the various R&D centres around the country. He presented seminars and workshops to TAPPSA members, researchers and academics at Mondi Merebank, Pamsa Head Office, Sappi Technology Centre, UKZN as well as the CSIR Forestry and Forest Products. His presentations are available on the TAPPSA web site under technical papers.
Richard is also co-supervisor for Jimmy Pauck’s PhD research project on recycling, so it was a good opportunity for them to connect and discuss the project. Richard’s research on stickies (macro and micro) raised a lot of interest, as well as the work he is doing on biofuels from paper mill sludges. Richard was kept very busy during his visit and I think that everyone he came into contact with during his visit benefitted to some degree.
An exciting new development for me, was to experience, for the first time, web conference training. A company that goes by the name of IBC, based in France, is offering Pulp and Paper technical courses over the internet. The presentation is transmitted via the internet and the sound is transmitted via land line (this avoids delays experienced with voice over internet protocol). The beauty of this arrangement is that it is very cost effective, in that the lecturers do not have to travel from their own countries to the course venue (not to mention their much reduced carbon footprint). Participants need not travel very far to a venue. The training can be held anywhere, providing there is a speaker phone available in the venue, a computer with internet access and a digital projector. There is a one-off fee for each connection (venue) so 20 people can be trained for about R1750 each, over four days (four hours per day).By the time you read this, notifications would have already been sent out via e-mail from the TAPPSA office regarding a paper machine drying course taking place from 8 to 11 June. Sign up now and learn more on how to conserve energy in the energy hungry section of your paper machine.
Sadly, due to the difficult economic conditions prevailing in our industry, it is unlikely that we will be running any Omni maintenance or operations courses this year, but a new offering from Omni is a Process Control troubleshooting course. There has been quite a bit of interest shown in this course and we will, in all likelihood run at least two of these courses in two different regions during July or August this year. The course is restricted to 12 participants per course as it involves problem solving using computer simulations, and there is only one trainer. Watch your e-mails and the web site for further news on this.
