Paper Is Made

How Paper is Made

By: Krysta Tangreen

Have you ever looked at a tree and wondered what that tree could do? Would it provide air for you to live? Or could it be an important report on that thing called paper? Paper is made from trees and that's why paper is all around us. When we are outside sitting in the shade, paper is still around us! If it weren't for trees we wouldn't be doing anything really. In a day how many times do you get out a piece of paper and write or do work?

Breaking It Down

How does a tree turn into paper? The fibers in a tree are called cellulose(cell-you-lowse). The only way for the paper to be made is if the cellulose (fibers) are separated. But the only way the fibers can be separated is if the lignin (Lig-nin) is removed.

The second step is to make the substance called pulp. In paper made from wood the pulp would consist of lignin, cellulose fibers, water and other chemicals to make the pulp. The pulp can be made from a couple different processes. The first one is mechanical pulping. Mechanical pulping is a process when the wood is grinded into little wood chips that can be made into thin papers like newspaper, phone books, and other thin papers. The other process is called chemical pulping. Chemical pulping is more commonly used and uses chemicals to separate the lignin from the cellulose to have a pulp to make stronger papers, like the paper you use to write a report. To color the paper white the pulp would be bleached to

In the experiment each piece of paper was a 3’3 inches and placed in to the same vat of water. The water was a little colder than warm and was done in a time span of 20 minutes. At first the regular paper curled then flattened, and was moving around for like a minute then stopped. The newspaper stayed in one spot and was flat the whole time. At 10 minutes I took the tip of my pencil and carefully gave each paper a move then a flip to the other side and nothing happened. At 15 minutes I pushed down each piece of paper with a light push. The water builded a little on each piece of paper but none of them went down. So when the timer hit 15.30 seconds again pushing it down lightly, nothing happened! At 16 minutes I pushed it down, and again nothing happened! So hopping one piece would go down, at 16.30 seconds again I pushed it down, all that happened was lots of water kept building up. Then at 16.46 seconds the newspaper hit right down to the bottom, but the regular paper wasn’t budging!

The final float for the regular paper was at 18.02 seconds!! Going down at 18.03 seconds, the regular paper won by a 1.57 second difference! This experiment shows that newspaper is actually weaker than regular paper. When I pulled out each piece of paper I felt it, the newspaper was thinner with the water and felt like really thin leather. The regular paper felt like thick leather. So the results