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Georgia-Pacific Wallboard Plant

Bob is at the port of Wilmington, Delaware, at the Georgia-Pacific wallboard plant. Every three weeks a cargo vessel laden with thirty thousand tons of gypsum from Nova Scotia arrives and drops the gypsum onto a conveyer belt that funnels into the football field-sized shed behind Bob. Gypsum is also known as calcium sulfate or plaster of Paris. Here, it is turned into wallboard. Bob meets with Monty Palmowski, the plan manager, for a tour. First the gypsum rock is dried and then ground. Then additional moisture is removed from the powdered form. Monty shows Bob the rolls of paper used on either side of the wallboard. The backing paper is rough while the front paper is smooth to accept paint. A slurry of gypsum is poured on top of the paper going down a conveyer belt. The sides are folded over and glue added to adhere the sides to the face paper, which is placed on top. It then goes through a machine that adjusts its thickness and produces a four-foot by eight hundred foot sheet of wallboard. The board sits to dry and then is cut into thirty six foot pieces and put in a drying oven by a conveyer belt that moves vertically. It sits in the oven for thirty-five minutes at six hundred degrees. After that it is cut into twelve-foot lengths and stacked and packaged. More information