Daniel Ludwig's Floating Factory

A giant pulp mill for the Amazon wilderness

Longer than two football fields, taller than a 16-story building, the off-white structure floating up the Amazon looked like a jungle apparition. In fact, it was a huge paper factory that Daniel K. Ludwig, the secretive shipping, mining and real estate industrialist whose net worth is estimated to be as high as $3 billion, intends to use in exploiting 500,000 acres of timberland that he owns in the Brazilian wilderness.

The barge-borne plant was towed by tugboat through the Indian and Atlantic oceans on a 15,000-mile, 93-day voyage from Kure, Japan, where it had been built by Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries (I.H.I.). In Brazil, it was taken to a docking area that had been constructed by 2,500 workers on the Jari River, an Amazon tributary 250 miles inland. The factory and its separate 55,000-kw power plant was floated into position over 4,000 submerged pilings last month. Then water under the pilings was drained, and Brazil's Munguba district, which before Ludwig was little more than a swatch of forest, got a new industrial enterprise. Why was the plant towed halfway round the globe instead of being built on the site? Says an I.H.I, spokesman: "It would have taken far more time to build so sophisticated a project there, with inadequate roads and cargo-handling facilities."

The $250 million plant will go into operation next year and by 1981 will turn out 750 metric tons of bleached kraft pulp a day, enough to make a single strand of toilet paper stretching more than 6 1/2 times around the world. (The pulp will be used for other products as well.)

Brazilian environmentalists worry over the long-range impact of Ludwig's deforestation. To feed the mill's appetite, Ludwig's crews have cleared nearly 250,000 acres of jungle so far and planted 81 million fast-growing trees; the raw wood will be hauled to the plant on 150 miles of Ludwig-built railroad.

Ludwig is a restless recluse at 80 and, some employees suggest, is seeking to build a pyramid to himself, a monument to his ten-year quest to tame a stretch of jungle almost the size of Connecticut and make it productive. Says an associate, Luis Antonio Oliveira: "Mr. Ludwig is nearing the end of his life, and he is more interested in undertaking something of great socioeconomic significance than in earning quick profits." Still, Ludwig is betting that a worldwide paper shortage is coming by 1985 and will make his gamble pay off.

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