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OLD TOWN – A low wood supply is leading Red Shield Environmental LLC, the company that purchased the former Georgia-Pacific Corp. mill in Old Town, to shut down for an estimated four days, according to the company spokesman.
“We don’t have the money like a Georgia-Pacific had to keep big wood pile inventories,” Red Shield spokesman and Dan Bird said Friday. “We’ve been a pretty lean startup company. We were just keeping ourselves so thin that we ran ourselves to a place where we had low inventory and started to see some difficulty.”
The wood Bird is referring to is used to make pulp and to fuel the facility’s biomass boiler that in turn produces power for the mill and electricity sold to the power grid.
The boiler is permitted to burn up to 500 tons of fuel a day. Half of that fuel can be construction and demolition debris, which is sorted waste wood that is less expensive than green chips.
At this time, Red Shield is burning a mix of about 75 percent green wood chips and 25 percent demolition debris wood.
The green wood is purchased from a variety of suppliers.
“We don’t own any woodlands or chip mills, so we go where we can negotiate the best price. This is no reflection on them,” Bird said. “Once you get so that inventory gets so low, you run the risk of having to do an uncontrolled shutdown where you’re not prepared for it. This is a very deliberate and controlled action. It makes good business sense to do, to take this short break.”
Bird said he anticipates the facility will be brought back online early next week.
“This is a period for us to catch our breath and rebuild our supplies,” Bird said. “We’re just waiting to make sure that we’ve got an adequate supply [of wood] so that we don’t take any risk in running out.”
Red Shield, which is made up of a group of private investors, purchased the facility after Georgia-Pacific Corp. announced it was closing the mill in 2006. Red Shield currently has about 190 employees, Bird said.
“As we speak, all employees are still engaged in doing that controlled shutdown,” Bird said.
The shutdown began late Thursday evening, a complicated process to ensure that startup can occur smoothly, he said.
The time off will be unpaid, but Bird said employees worked overtime during a recent scheduled maintenance shutdown. Company officials are hoping everyone can enjoy the weekend before returning to the mill next week to begin the startup process tentatively scheduled to begin Tuesday.
“Right now our plan is to restart Tuesday, but that could shift a little bit,” Bird said.
Red Shield recently had an unrelated shutdown for maintenance purposes and scheduled upgrades to the facility, Bird said.
When the mill restarted, some residents in Bradley expressed concerns to the state Department of Environmental Protection about the color of the steam being released from the stacks.
The DEP investigated and found the mill to be in compliance with all regulations, Bryce Sproul of DEP’s Bureau of Air Quality said Friday.
Red Shield also was required at the end of last month to provide controls for TRS gases, which can produce a foul smell at pulp facilities.
“That deadline was imposed in an administrative order from the [Environmental Protection Agency] in Boston,” Sproul said. “They met that date, and the control equipment was in.”
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