Georgia Pacific Installs Natural Gas Boilers at its Green Bay Plant
The facility is turning to natural gas boilers instead of coal.
Passersby near Georgia Pacific’s Green Bay plant noticed that there is a massive crane next to the smokestack. This marks the beginning of the effort to officially take the second stack down.
“The skyline of Green Bay will look different!” said Georgia-Pacific Public Affairs Manager, Mike Kawleski. “The stack joins some other decommissioning of coal handling equipment and towers that we don’t need anymore because we’re no longer using coal.”
The facility is turning to natural gas boilers instead of coal. The second boiler was delivered last year, and cost $27 million to purchase and install. Kawleski says it will also cost about $14 million to completely take down and remove the obsolete building and equipment from the mill.
With the crane in place and a massive structure to remove, the question for many becomes – how are they going to get that down?
Kawleski told WTAQ News that to remove the massive structure, “[contractors] will go up to the top of it and they dismantle it down to a certain level that we can actually use a crane and a wrecking ball to demolish the rest of it.”
“Well, we would love to have an implosion or something dramatic to show everybody – but our facility has a lot of surrounding buildings and structures around the stack,” he stated.
The demolition is expected to be completed by late fall.
Approximately 2,300 Georgia-Pacific employees work in Green Bay, according to the company’s website. About 1,725 mill employees manufacture and distribute commercial and retail brands of paper products (bath tissue, napkins, towels) and about 600 business support employees provide engineering, transportation, data processing, and customer services.