I Had the pleasure of taking a mill tour today at the Pabco Paper mill in Vernon. The PABCO Paper plant was built in 1912 in the industrial city of Vernon just southeast of downtown Los Angeles. The mill Produces Chipboard that is made into boxes and other items such as slip sheets and dividers. Here are some Pics that I took! 

This is how recycled paper starts out, Shredded pulp and paper fiber  

Large bales of recycled material are kept on hand to feed the paper machine

The pulp is moved over to a huge vat that acts like a massive blender

The pulp is mostly water at this point and very hot. The mix is then pumped into the paper machine and onto screens to be layered into paper.

DSC02075 The paper gets pressed between rollers which removes most of the water. The paper machine is almost as long as a football field and makes rolls of paper 100" wide. Depending on the thickness of the paper if a single roll was unwound, the paper could reach 2 miles in length!

Paper making is a very HOT process as you can see! It takes a lot of heat to dry out the paper before it can be wound into a roll.

At this point the paper has taken shape and is ready to be wound up into a huge 100" wide roll that is 60" in diameter!

Once the rolls get to a certain diameter they are taken off the paper machine and hoisted over to another machine called a Slitter Rewinder. This machine cuts the Jumbo roll into several smaller rolls.

Here is a pic of the finished product!

So that was my lunch hour at The Pabco paper mill in Vernon. Pabco was celebrating their 60th anniversary at this facility. I had a great time and learned a ton ; ) All the pics were taken with my iPhone 4GS ( I know hard to believe)!