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Description
Paper is a thin material produced by pressing together
moist fibres of cellulose pulp derived from wood, rags
or grasses, and drying them into flexible sheets. It is a
versatile material with many uses,
including writing, printing, packaging, cleaning, and a
number of industrial and construction processes.
The word "paper" is etymologically derived
from papyrus, Ancient Greek for the Cyperus
papyrus plant. Papyrus is a thick, paper-like material
produced from the pith of the Cyperus papyrus plant
which was used in ancient Egypt and
other Mediterranean societies for writing long before
Paper was used in China. Papyrus however are plants
pressed and dried, while paper is made from fibers
whose properties have been changed by maceration or
disintegration.
Roman portraiture fresco of a young man with a papyrus scroll, from Herculaneum, 1st century AD
Description
Wood pulp is wood that has been cut up into small
pieces and crushed. Wood pulp is used to make paper.
Pulp is a lignocellulosic fibrous material
prepared by chemically or mechanically
separating cellulose fibres from wood, fiber crops, waste
paper, or rags. Many kinds of paper are made from
wood with nothing else mixed into them. This includes
newspaper, magazines and even toilet paper. Pulp is
one of the most abundant raw materials worldwide.
Where the product was produced
Papermaking using pulp made from hemp and
linen fibers from tattered clothing, fishing nets and
fabric bags spread to Europe in the 13th century, with
an ever-increasing use of rags being central to the
manufacture and affordability of rag paper, a factor in
the development of printing. By the 1800s, demand
often exceeding the available supply of rags, and also
the manual labor of papermaking resulted in paper
being still a relatively pricey product.
Using wood pulp to make paper is a fairly recent
innovation that was almost concurrent to the invention
of automatic papermaking machines, both together
resulting in paper and cardboard becoming an
inexpensive commodity in modern times. Although the
first use of paper made from wood pulp dates from
1800, as seen in some pages of a book published by
Matthias Koop's that year
in London, large-scale wood paper production began
with the development of mechanical pulping in
Germany by Friedrich Gottlob Keller in the 1840s, and by
the Canadian inventor Charles Fenerty in Nova Scotia,
Chemical processes quickly followed, first with J. Roth's
use of sulfurous acid to treat wood, then by Benjamin
Tilghman's U.S. patent on the use of calcium bisulfite,
Ca(HSO3)2, to pulp wood in 1867. Almost a decade later,
the first commercial sulfite pulp mill was built, in
Sweden. It used magnesium as the counter ion and was
based on work by Carl Daniel Ekman. By 1900, sulfite
pulping had become the dominant means of producing
wood pulp, surpassing mechanical pulping methods. The
competing chemical pulping process, the sulfate,
or Kraft, process was developed by Carl F. Dahl in 1879;
the first Kraft mill started, in Sweden, in 1890. The
invention of the recovery boiler, by G.H. Tomlinson in
the early 1930s, allowed Kraft mills to recycle almost all
of their pulping chemicals. This, along with the ability of
the Kraft process to accept a wider variety of types of
wood and to produce stronger fibres, made the Kraft
process the dominant pulping process, starting in the
1940s.
Global production of wood pulp in 2006 was
175 million tons (160 million tonnes). In the previous
year, 63 million tons (57 million tonnes) of market pulp
(not made into paper in the same facility) was sold, with
Canada being the largest source at 21 percent of the
total, followed by the United States at 16 percent.
The wood fiber sources required for pulping are "45%
sawmill residue, 21% logs and chips, and 34% recycled
paper" (Canada, 2014). Chemical pulp made up 93
percent of market pulp.
Utilization
Wood pulp is the most common material used to
make paper.
The timber resources used to make wood pulp are
referred to as pulpwood. Wood pulp comes
from softwood trees such
as spruce, pine, fir, larch and hemlock,
and hardwoods such as eucalyptus, aspen and birch.
A pulp mill is a manufacturing facility that converts
wood chips or other plant fibre source into a thick
fiberboard which can be shipped for paper mill for
further processing. Wood and other plant materials
used to make pulp contain three main components
(apart from water): cellulose fibers (desired for
papermaking), lignin (a three-dimensional polymer that
binds the cellulose fibres together) and hemicelluloses,
(shorter branched carbohydrate polymers).
Pulp to paper
3. In order to finally turn the pulp into paper, the
pulp is fed or pumped into giant, automated
machines. One common type is called the
Fourdrinier machine, which was invented in
England in 1807. Pulp is fed into the Fourdrinier
machine on a moving belt of fine mesh screening.
The pulp is squeezed through a series of rollers,
while suction devices below the belt drain off
water. If the paper is to receive a water-mark, a
device called a dandy moves across the sheet of
pulp and presses a design into it.
The paper then moves onto the press section of
the machine, where it is pressed between rollers of
wool felt. The paper then passes over a series of
steam-heated cylinders to remove the remaining
water. A large machine may have from 40 to 70
drying cylinders.
Chemical pulping
Main articles: Kraft process, sulfite process,
and soda pulping
To make pulp from wood, a chemical pulping
process separates lignin from cellulose fibres. This
is accomplished by dissolving lignin in a cooking
liquor, so that it may be washed from the cellulose;
this preserves the length of the cellulose fibres.
Paper made from chemical pulps are also known
as wood-free papers–not to be confused with tree-
free paper; this is because they do not contain
lignin, which deteriorates over time. The pulp can
also be bleached to produce white paper, but this
consumes 5% of the fibres; chemical pulping
processes are not used to make paper made from
cotton, which is already 90% cellulose.
Mechanical pulping
There are two major mechanical pulps: thermo
mechanical pulp (TMP) and ground wood pulp (GW). In
the TMP process, wood is chipped and then fed into
steam heated refiners, where the chips are squeezed
and converted to fibres between two steel discs. In the
ground wood process, debarked logs are fed into
grinders where they are pressed against rotating stones
to be made into fibres. Mechanical pulping does not
remove the lignin, so the yield is very high, >95%,
however it causes the paper thus produced to turn
yellow and become brittle over time. Mechanical pulps
have rather short fibres, thus producing weak paper.
Although large amounts of electrical energy are required
to produce mechanical pulp, it costs less than the
chemical kind.
De-Inked pulp
Paper recycling processes can use either chemically
or mechanically produced pulp; by mixing it with water
and applying mechanical action the hydrogen bonds in
the paper can be broken and fibres separated again.
Most recycled paper contains a proportion of virgin fibre
for the sake of quality; generally speaking, de-inked pulp
is of the same quality or lower than the collected paper
it was made from.