This Planet named Earth had some ups and downs with paper. Today you will read all about paper from how it’s made, to people who changed paper in a significant way. Sit back and have fun.
Our beloved planet has had numerous effects with paper. For the past 40 years, paper production has risen by more than 400%, so that means lots of trees have been cut down, which means there aren’t as many trees as there were 40 years ago. 35% of all trees have been cut down just for paper, but on the bright side most companies regrow trees so all the trees will be restored.
To make pulp from wood, a chemical pulping process disconnects from some chemical called lignin from another chemical called cellulose. There is a black and white type of liquor that dissolves into lignin. Then in a couple of minutes, it’s then washed into two different chemicals. They divide the lignin and the cellulose into two different columns. Paper is also made from another type of chemical pulps. It has no wood in it. It’s called wood-free paper. They call it this because they do not add lignin and that slowly degrades.
Pulp can also be taken out to make even whiter paper, but this also eats more than 5% of the fibers, which makes the paper thinner. Did you know that paper was made from cotton long before they used wood pulp? So with that, the whiter you want, the thinner you get! The CPP (short for the chemical pulping process) is not always used to make paper from this fluffy object named cotton, which already has an overdose of 90% cellulose. An overdose of cellulose! WOW!
There are multiple CPPs and I’m about to tell you the most important one, which was invented back in the 1840s. Ladies and Gentlemen, prepare to be astonished.
Did you have any idea that this man with a bald head the size of a small mountain invented the modern paper-making process?
Let me introduce you to Charles Fenerty. Every time this odd person went to transport this wood to some small city that would later become Halifax, he would pass the local paper mills, and he would even sometimes watch them make paper. Back in the olden days paper was made from pulped rags, cotton and sometimes other plant fibers. People were so interested in the idea of paper; the shipments from Europe to America just started to stop so school teachers were running out.
Fenerty had just learned that trees also had fibres in them, from discussions with the naturalist Titus Smith. At the age of 17 he began experimenting with wood to turn into paper. By the year 1844, he had the process so dialed in, he could do it on the road. There is some information about Fenerty in this letter which supposedly he told his friend Charles Hamilton in 1840 that he had shown a small sample of paper to him. In the same year he took another sample of the paper and gave it to Halifax’s top newspaper, the Acadian recorder and wrote a letter to them:
Enclosed is a small piece of PAPER, the result of an experiment I have made, in order to ascertain if that useful article might not be manufactured from WOOD. The result has proved that opinion to be correct, for- by the sample which I have sent you, Gentlemen- you will perceive the feasibility of it. The enclosed, which is as firm in its texture as white, and to all appearance as durable as the common wrapping paper made from hemp, cotton, or the ordinary materials of manufacture is ACTUALLY COMPOSED OF SPRUCE WOOD, reduced to a pulp, and subjected to the same treatment as paper is in course of being made, only with this exception, VIZ: my insufficient means of giving it the required pressure. I entertain an opinion that our common forest trees, either hard or soft wood, but more especially the fir, spruce, or poplar, on account of the fibrous quality of their wood, might easily be reduced by a chafing machine, and manufactured into paper of the finest kind. This opinion, Sirs, I think the experiment will justify, and leave it to be prosecuted further by the scientific, or the curious.
Another one is the kraft process and dates back to the 1870s. Sodium hydroxide which is also found in aluminum, is used, and sodium sulfide which is also founded in rubber. When these 2 chemicals mix some reaction happens: sodium hydroxide is founded in aluminum. Sodium sulfide is also founded in rubber. When these two chemicals mix some sort of relation happens with smoke.
Most pulping operations using the kraft process are net contributors to the electricity grid, using the electricity to run the mills. Another method is the soda pulping, and it’s usually used to pulp straws, bagasse (bagasse is a dry soft object from the extraction of juices from usually sugar cane and used for fuel for electricity generators, etc). See that tiny little electrical plant?
Coated paper is a thin layer of material that is calcium carbonate or kaolinite (china clay),
and is applied to both sides in order to create a surface that is comfortable for aspiring writers like you to scratch on. Coated or uncoated papers may have their surface polished by calendering (when you put an object into this mechanism which flattens it. The mechanism is made up of 3 cylinders).
Coated papers are divided into matte, semi-matte or silk, and gloss; gloss papers give the highest optical density in the image. I myself have a silk type car in my family: my dad’s Toyota Tacoma!
Back to paper: the paper is then fed onto reels if it is to be used on the web printing press, or cut into the paper sheets for other printing processes. The fibers in the paper are made from the machine’s directions. The paper is usually cut “long grain” with grain that are the same to the longer sides of the paper.
Pulp is fed to a machine that produces it, it is then formed into a paper web and then all the excess water is removed. Soon after you would form the web by pressing and drying it.
A way to get rid of all the excess water out is by pressing it so hard, all the water will leak out. Once all the water is out of the web, a special kind of felt is used to collect the water.
When you are drying the paper, it involves hot air. Earlier, they would attach pins to the paper and let it sit there until it dried all the water out. In the present day we are spoiled and use machines to do it for us. When we are drying the most common machine we use is the steam heater which can get up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit or 93 degrees Celsius. On the dark side, 40% of all waste is just from paper in the old US of A each year. Americans also use over 16 million paper cups every year. If you combine the two, that means there are 71.6 million TONS of paper waste every year. And the average office worker prints 31 papers per day. You don’t think that’s a lot, but it all adds up then piles and piles of paper which will increase dramatically.
The thickness of paper is usually measured by a caliper, which is measured in thousandths of an inch or micrometres if you are in all other places in the world. Paper is usually between 0.07 and 0.18 millimeters long or 0.0028 and 0.0071 inches in thickness.
Paper also has a weight scale. In the U.S.A. they are weighed by ream and are also called bundles of 500. There are different types of paper and it is sold depending on the weight. For example, a ream of 20 lb, 8.5 in × 11 in (216 mm × 279 mm) paper weighs 5 pounds because it has been cut from larger sheets into four pieces. The US usually has printing paper that are usually 20Ib at the minimum and 32Ib at the max. Cover stock is generally 68 Ib, and 110Ib or more is also known as card stock.
Some manufacturers have started a brand new eco-friendly way to reach out to the public. Instead of using plastic bags for shopping they instead replace them with paper bags so we don’t pollute the ocean. Plastic bags are not biodegradable but guess what? paper bags are. The reason for this is because we don’t pollute the ocean as much as paper and will eventually die out. On the other hand plastic bags choke sea creatures, and pollute.
Also synthetic such as Tyvek and Teslin have introduced printing media as a more durable material than paper but does the same thing. It’s more durable than paper and it also biodegrades. They are willing to spread this material to the community so bags won’t break and they can be recyclable.