#Paper July 12

We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post.

Today is Day 12 of the 30-Day Ingredient Coach4aday Challenge with the focus on what goes into making PAPER. Special emphasis on the type we use in copiers.

Living in North Carolina you can pick up a distinctive odor driving thru Canton, Riegelwood, and Roanoke Rapids because each town contains a Paper Mill.

Paper mills can at times produce very unpleasant smells. The distinctive odor of sulfur, similar to rotten
eggs, is characteristic of many industrial processes, including the kraft pulp mill process used in the
manufacturing of paper. That odor is usually associated with hydrogen sulfide.

What happens in each of these plants may depend on what type of PAPER is being manufactured.

Manufacturing Process

It will not be shocking to realize the main ingredient to create most of the pulp in the US needed to manufacture any type of paper product is wood. Some of the best products contain cotton and the best are made of all cotton. The fibers in wood or cotton are created by one of two processes chemical or mechanical.

Chemical pulp starts with logs that have had their bark peeled off and that have been reduced to chips. The wood chips are boiled in strong caustic solutions that dissolve away parts of the wood that are not cellulose.

Mechanical pulp is mostly made by stone-grinding peeled logs in a stream of water so that the wood is broken up into fibers. 

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