Paper..something people take for granted both at home & at work.

Paper products that may be found in the home can include:

wrapping paper,printing paper,bank note paper,paper nappies,incontinence pads,sanitary towels,baby wipes,note paper,sugar bag paper,paper bags(food & non-food grade)butter paper,paper tea bags,coffee filter paper,laminated chipboard,cardboard & adhesive tape,airmail letters,sandpaper,labels,calendars,cheque books,financial statements,paper straws,kitchen towels,paper hankies,stamps,envelopes ...the list is endless.

Some of the main areas of Y2K vulnerability in the paper industry are listed below :

The paper industry worldwide is heavily dependant on chemicals for de-inking waste paper,chemically degrading wood chips to make pulp & the bleaching,dying,sizing and coating processes.Many of the raw materials,especially alum are imported from Third World countries.

Unless a mill is near its source of raw material,the pulp is shipped in.Depending on the type of fibre needed to make the grade,this can be from 1000's of miles away.For example here in the UK at Griffen Mill we use hemp from the Phillipines,esparto from Tunisia,linen from Spain & cotton from America.(Some of our pulp we actually buy from a mill in Gloucester that makes coffee filter paper for the USA)

In a modern papermill or board mill the process is controlled by computer via web sensors.(a still wet layer of paper is called a web)

A pulp mill,papermill or board mill utilises an enormous amount of power.In order to maintain profitability paper machines run faster every year.Thus the imput of raw materials and power consumption increases year in year out. I might add too,that the papermaking process requires a heck of a lot of water.Environmentally challenged mills have been slowly moving to closed loop systems in the '90's .

Lastly,paper has to be transported to the customer.This can be a paper converter eg your envelope or bag maker or the paper merchant.We are taking of tons per hour.

Here in the UK there appears to be no co-ordinating/reporting body for the paper industry.

I have been speaking face to face & by telephone to buyers in other mills(all quoted on the Stock Exchange)and the level of understanding of the vulnerability to a non-compliant supply chain,both up and down, has been frightening.

So,folks,unless it is different where you are,think about stocking up on paper products if only for bartering! No special storage facilities needed.Just keep it clean & dry and preferably in the dark.

PS>The papermills also use JIT.

-- Chris (griffen@globalnet.co.uk), May 05, 1999

Answers

Chris, I asked a question about paper in January or February and got a very informative set of responses. It's probably in the "Don't Know" archive.

I have no confidence in the paper industry's compliance, and it sounds as if you concur.

-- Puddintame (achillesg@hotmail.com), May 05, 1999.

How about a pencil to go with that paper... <:)=

I am a lead pencil  the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.

Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that's all I do.

You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery  more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, the wise G. K. Chesterton observed, `"We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders."

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me  no, that's too much to ask of anyone  if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because  well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.

Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye  there's some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.

Innumerable Antecedents

Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background.

My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!

The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto? These legions are among my antecedents.

Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil- length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces. People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. How many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill's power!

Don't overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation.

Once in the pencil factory--$4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine--each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat atop--a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this "wood- clinched'" sandwich.

My "lead'" itself--it contains no lead at all--is complex. The graphite is mined in Ceylon. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships. Even the lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth--and the harbor pilots.

The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow--animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions--as from a sausage grinder--cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.

My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are. Why, even the processes by which the lacquer is made a beautiful yellow involves the skills of more persons than one can enumerate!

Observe the labeling. That's a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?

My bit of metal--the ferrule--is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain.

Then there's my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to in the trade as "the plug," the part man uses to erase the errors he makes with me. An ingredient called "factice" is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rape- seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and the pigment which gives "the plug" its color is cadmium sulfide.

No One Knows

Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?

Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn't a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field--paraffin being a by-product of petroleum.

Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.

No Master Mind

There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to which I earlier referred.

It has been said that "'only God can make a tree.'" Why do we agree with this? Isn't it because we realize that we ourselves could not make one? Indeed, can we even describe a tree? We cannot, except in superficial terms. We can say, for instance, that a certain molecular configuration manifests itself as a tree. But what mind is there among men that could even record, let alone direct, the constant changes in molecules that transpire in the life span of a tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable!

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies--millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.

The above is what I meant when writing, "If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing." For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand--that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive master-minding  then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.

Once government has had a monopoly of a creative activity such, for instance, as the delivery of the mails, most individuals will believe that the mails could not be efficiently delivered by men acting freely. And here is the reason: Each one acknowledges that he himself doesn't know how to do all the things incident to mail delivery. He also recognizes that no other individual could do it. These assumptions are correct. No individual possesses enough know-how to perform a nation's mail delivery any more than any individual possesses enough know-how to make a pencil. Now, in the absence of faith in free people  in the unawareness that millions of tiny know-hows would naturally and miraculously form and cooperate to satisfy this necessity  the individual cannot help but reach the erroneous conclusion that mail can be delivered only by governmental "master-minding."

Testimony Galore

If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men and women can accomplish when free to try, then those with little faith would have a fair case. However, there is testimony galore; it's all about us and on every hand. Mail delivery is exceedingly simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things. Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second; they deliver an event visually and in motion to any person's home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas to one's range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard  halfway around the world  for less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.

Leonard E. Read

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), May 05, 1999.

Sysman, Just brilliant !!!

I just keep wondering what will happen if we all run out of printer cartidges & the phone's on the blink.

Puddintame, Thanks,I'll have a look.

-- Chris (griffen@globalnet.co.uk), May 05, 1999.

Chris:

If basic infrastructure fails (power, water, railroads, etc.), then a ready supply of paper is pretty low on the urgency list. So assuming they will not fail (good assumption in the US, maybe less so in th UK), the paper industry is in realtively good shape. My company sells automation equipment to the paper industry and better than 90% of all products sold now and in the past are Y2K ready and the ones that are not have simple upgrades or only cosmetic non-compliance issues. BTW, I've been to the UK a few times and the Griffen Mill does not ring any bells. What company is it part of?

-- RMS (rms_200@hotmail.com), May 05, 1999.

RMS-I wouldn't want to be without toilet paper for any length of time.

-- Amused (amused@laughing.com), May 05, 1999.

SYSMAN: Thank you. We all need to be reminded of the precious productive legacy we have inherited as citizens of this country. The producing of a "simple" pencil represents the collective abilities and accumulated capital of many hours of time and effort "invested" by those that have come before.

Before we callously watch the frivilous squandering of that which it represents (the lives of those that demonstrate the best potential that lies within each of us), we should at least be reminded of the tremendous achievement the making of a pencil represents.

In terms of Y2K, the article is a reminder of the incredibly long and complex causal chain that, prior to the birth of "the computer age," we had to perform with direct "hands-on" human effort. Computers now make this process one that is even more likely to be taken for granted

I sincerly hope that we may continue to do so after the beginning of the new milenium..............

-- Dave Walden (wprop@concentric.net), May 05, 1999.

Thanks for the reminder, Chris. I don't think that I would enjoy trying to do rotation planting from memory each year. It seems the map of your garden you drew in the dirt keeps washing away after a rain.

-- Lobo (atthelair@yahoo.com), May 05, 1999.

Sysman,

Thanks for that I pencil reminder. I read that on another site and it was instrumental in my realization of just how fragile our system is.

-- R. Wright (blaklodg@aol.com), May 06, 1999.

Sysman, this is great. I hope you don't mind but I'm going to borrow it for the government thread we've got going.

-- Nikoli Krushev (doomsday@y2000.com), May 06, 1999.