Papermaking

In order for a tree to be converted into the sheet of paper, like the one you are reading this essay on, it must go through many processes before the consumer receives the final product. Selected trees, which range from twenty to forty feet, are harvested with all of the tops and branches left in the woods. The logs are then transported to the mill on special trucks called, ironically enough, logging trucks. These trucks can carry up to fifty logs at once.

When the truck enters the mill it is directed to an area where the logs will be unloaded with a crane with a special scissor attachment. This crane can remove all fifty logs at one time, it’s that big. This same crane is also utilized to transport the logs to a big blue building called the Wood Room. In the Wood Room, the logs will be de-barked and reduced to wood chips the size of a dollar bill.

The wood chips are then sent to another building called the Pulp Mill via a con

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The slurry is then “beaten” or mixed with water in huge vats, which can hold up to four thousand gallons at a time. These rolls are then loaded onto a machine called a Bielomatic, or sheeter. Depending on the thickness of the sheet the footage may vary. After all of the coloring other special additives such as starch, salt, and calcium carbonate, which keeps ink from bleeding through a sheet of paper. A sheeter unwinds these rolls and cuts them into any desired widths or lengths, in our case, eight and a half by eleven inches. Now the slurry is referred to as stock.

Even with such a potent process, the slurry must still be treated yet again before it can become white enough for common copy paper. The boxes are then sent to the warehouse over a series of conveyors and placed on wood pallets to be shipped to the retailers where the consumer can purchase the final product, a ream of paper. A paper machine produces a sheet of paper, which is wound on a reel, that is one-hundred and eighty inches wide, six feet tall, and up to eighty thousand feet long. At the end of a paper machine is a piece of equipment called a calendar stack. A paper machines main function is to remove all of the water.

In order to get the paper into manageable widths and lengths, usually forty by forty inches, the reel is placed into a machine called a winder. The terms to describe the degree of roughness are vellum, smooth, and luster. Both names refer to the same area for good reason.

Approximate Word count = 654
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

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