Managing Stickies, Resin, and Wax Buildup: Why Traditional Cleaning Fails in Paper & Tissue Mills

Every paper and tissue mill deals with “stickies” - the industry term for the tacky contaminants that come from adhesives, coatings, and wood resins in the furnish, particularly when recycled fiber is part of the mix. Stickies don’t stay contained to one part of the process. They travel through the wet end, deposit on rolls, felts, wires, and press sections, and gradually build into a hardened glaze that’s far more difficult to remove than the soft, tacky material it started as.

This post continues our series on paper mill cleaning and follows our look at dry ice blasting for paper machines, narrowing in on why this specific type of contamination needs a different approach than ordinary dust or dirt.

Why Stickies Are Harder to Remove Than They Look

Fresh stickies are soft and pliable, which makes them seem easy to deal with. But once they cure - through heat exposure in the dryer section, or simply time - they bond tightly to metal surfaces in a way general-purpose degreasers and standard pressure washing don’t fully break down. Wiping or washing often removes the surface layer while leaving a baked-on residue underneath, which means the problem looks solved right up until the next production run reveals it wasn’t.

Left unaddressed, stickies buildup causes:

• Web breaks and holes as contaminated felts and wires transfer defects into the sheet
• Reduced dewatering efficiency as press felts lose permeability under a layer of residue
• Accelerated wear on rolls and bearings as hardened deposits change surface geometry and create uneven loading

Why Abrasive and Chemical Methods Create New Problems

Aggressive scraping or wire brushing can remove hardened stickies, but it also risks scoring precision roll surfaces - an expensive mistake on components that are engineered to extremely tight tolerances. Solvent-based chemical cleaners can work, but many aren’t compatible with food-contact tissue production, and they introduce their own handling, disposal, and worker exposure considerations that mills are increasingly trying to avoid.

Dry Ice Blasting as the Better Fit

Because dry ice blasting is non-abrasive and leaves no chemical residue, it removes hardened resin and wax deposits without altering the surface profile of the roll or cylinder underneath - the same reason it’s become the standard method for headbox and dryer section cleaning, which we cover in more detail in our post on paper machine cleaning. It also avoids introducing moisture near bearings and electrical components, and produces no secondary waste stream to manage - the dry ice itself sublimates on contact.

This principle isn’t unique to paper mills. We see the same dynamic with hardened starch buildup on corrugator rolls, which we cover in more detail in Precision Industrial Machinery Cleaning - different contaminant, same underlying problem of protecting precision equipment from cleaning methods that solve one issue while creating another.

Building Stickies Management Into a Regular Cycle

Because stickies buildup is progressive, the most effective programs treat it as a scheduled maintenance item tied to your planned outages, not a response to a quality complaint. Mapping which felts, rolls, and cylinders accumulate deposits fastest lets a cleaning program target the highest-risk equipment first rather than treating the whole machine identically.

Kelly Industrial Services builds stickies and resin management directly into our Paper Mill & Tissue Facility Cleaning programs, using Machine Cleaning crews trained specifically on paper machine components - not general facility cleaning staff working outside their expertise.

Next, we’ll move beyond the machine itself to the building envelope - what constant heat and humidity do to walls, ceilings, and structural steel in a paper mill, and how to protect them.