As normal I figure people might want to see this so I'm posting it as well as turning it in.
I really should keep this more updated. I've done a lot of cool things recently, stated dating, went to the gibiri museum, walked around some really nice parks, and I'm planning on going on a crazy fun vacation soon. Maybe I'll post here with more memories when I get some free time.
With that here is my really really badly written Kawasaki Eco Town report.
Kawasaki Eco Town
Factory Study Tour
For our first factory study tour of the quarter we went to the Kawasaki Eco Town in Kawasaki city. The Kawaasaki Eco town is actually a combination of a few different factories in the same area that are all united in providing ecologically friendly factory conditions, and recycling of materials. It is probably the greenest factory we have been to so far.
We began the visit by waiting briefing room for a bit before we were introduced to the a factory head. He gave a brief introduction, and then described the basic layout of the factory and the techniques and technology used inside.
The introduction and the tour followed the same basic pathway so I will describe them in simultaneously.
The factory that we toured that day was a factory for making toilet paper out of recycled goods. All the toilet paper was 100% recycled and they were able to make many different kinds of paper, which I will describe later on.
The first part of the tour we saw the reciving area, where the factory received the goods that have been recycled and fed them into the rest of the supply chain. In the receving area there were trucks and boxes of various things, paper from companies, train tickets, and milk containers . Milk containers were the best paper to make toilet paper out of because of their high fiber count.
Right after the reviving area there was a basic separation station. There the paper and large metal objects were separated out, via centrifuge. However this was not enough to create pure paper for recycling. Staples and other things that can't be recycled were still left in the paper.
That brought us to the next container, which was a giant vat of water + chemicals that dissolved the paper into its constituent fibers making it so the metal settled to the bottom and the paper itself remained at the top. It takes about 12 hours for one run to be totally dissolved and moved on for further processing.
After the paper is dissolved it must be bleached to remove dyes and inks that made the paper useful, this was done with H2O2 in smaller vats, this processing was much faster.
After the fibers were fully processed it was time to turn them back into paper. This was done by quickly spinning and drying new paper at the same time on rollers, I'm not exactly sure how this was done but it was really cool to watch. Also the paper rolls generated were giant, over 1.8m in diameter. It was really cool to see. Each of these rolls were then spun down, into smaller rolls for the purposes of making toilet paper. The smaller rolls were about 2m long, but the diameter of toilet paper rolls.
These smaller rolls were then cut up in many different places, leaving a roll of paper the size of a toilet paper roll remaining. They were then sent to a packaging system that packages them 24 at a time and move to the distribution section of the warehouse.
The plant in total produces about 1million rolls a day, which I though was really cool, but actually its not so much if you think about it.
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