Wikijunior:How Things Are Made/Wood/Paper

That’s a lot of paper.

Raw Materials

We need trees and complicated chemicals to make paper. Sometimes we recycle paper and it has a separate article. Please go back to this page, and look for a page called "Recycled Paper".

Images

Tree

   

Process

A chainsaw. The sharp thing is colored grey. It's the part that’s cutting the piece of wood in the picture. The two hands are a lumberjack operating it.

1. Grown-ups called lumberjacks go to big forests with equipment like a chainsaw, and a truck to carry all their logs. The lumberjacks will work together to bring the logs to the truck. They keep going until they get enough logs.

2. The logs are taken to a spinning barrel, called a drum so they can remove the bark and get the wood.

3. The logs are ground up into a white liquid called pulp by being pressed against two huge revolving drums, over and over again.

Bark is the skin of trees. In the center of the tree, is the wood that is needed for the paper. Only bark is visible, and it is the brown lines in the picture.

4. The pulp is filtered to remove unwanted liquids and objects and particles that would mess up the paper and make it bad, and compromise it’s quality.

5. Trucks fill up with the pulp, they leave, and then they drive to a paper mill. At the paper mill, the pulp goes under a process, called beating.

The pulp is beaten over and over again by mechanical beaters. Now, the paper mill can have weird and complicated chemicals put into the paper, like chalk, clay or a chemical like titanium oxide.