You use your notebook to take notes, write stories, or even record your thoughts. But what is that paper made of?
Wood pulp derived from softwood trees is the main raw material for notebook paper. Other components include fillers, binders, chemical additives, bleach, dyes and sizing agents. The result is a versatile writing surface.
Wood Pulp
Wood pulp is the primary material that goes into all paper products, including notebooks. It’s made by chemically or mechanically reducing long, soft wood fibers into a wet, pliable form that can be used to make papers. It’s also a key ingredient in tissues, napkins, magazines, food packaging, cardboard, and other everyday items.
It can be reprocessed to produce dissolved pulps (used in absorbent products such as diapers) and bleached pulps, which are ideal for printing and writing papers. Another popular type of paper is card, which is a thicker version that’s often used in greetings cards and packaging.
Other ingredients, like fillers and binder, can help enhance the paper’s opacity, smoothness, brightness, or weight. Lastly, the fibers are expertly formed into sheets of paper using a Fourdrinier machine.
Fillers
Fillers are powder products of mineral origin (normally calcium carbonate and sulphate, kaolin, talc and silica) that fill the spaces between cellulose fibres. They are added to improve the paper’s opacity, smoothness and brightness. However, this comes at the cost of reducing its mechanical qualities since they take up space that could otherwise have been used by cellulose fibres.
Lastly, binder materials like starch are added to ensure that the wood fibers and fillers adhere together and form a cohesive sheet of notebook paper. Dyes and bleaching agents are also sometimes incorporated to achieve desired color and whiteness levels. Finally, a remarkable machine known as the Fourdrinier machine transforms all these ingredients into sheets of notebook paper.
Binders
Notebook binders offer the flexibility of using loose leaf paper and a lightweight cover. They’re available in a wide range of styles and formats for different projects.
Spiral binding, also known as coil binding, utilizes a durable plastic or metal coil to hold a notebook’s pages and cover together. It’s easy to assemble and offers a modern look with a flexible spine. It also allows for a number of different options for cover material and color.
Sewn binding is a popular method for traditional books. It’s durable and allows pages to lie flat when opened. It requires less materials than other binding methods, allowing for cost-effective production. End papers, made of a paper stock that is thicker than the cover, encase the bookblock and add a visual element to the finished product.
Chemical Additives
Besides the wood pulp, other chemical additives are used in the paper making process. These chemicals help in various processes from creating the initial cellulose fibers to forming the final notebook paper sheet.
These chemicals include wet-strength polymer which helps the paper retain its strength when it gets wet. These polymers can be natural like melamine-formaldehyde or synthetic such as polyamide-epichlorohydrin or glyoxylated polyacrylamide.
Fillers such as China clay, talc and calcium carbonate are used to increase brightness and printability of the paper. Rosin, alum and other combinations of these chemicals are used to make paper water resistant.
The refined pulp is then fed through a Fourdrinier machine that continuously forms sheets of the material. These sheets are then dried and processed. Sizing, calendering and saturating is done to finish the paper.
Dyes
In the past, dyes from a variety of sources were used to color paper. Yellows were obtained from saffron and turmeric; reds from kermes insects and madder roots; and blues from indigo plants and henna.
Generally speaking, basic and acid dyes are most commonly used in the paper industry to achieve certain shade and quality targets. However, dyeing with these is not good for papers without sizing as they tend to agglomerate in the presence of aluminum sulfate.
Direct dyes, on the other hand, are a much better choice for non-sizing papers as they have strong affinity with fiber and provide excellent heat and light resistance. Solenis’ Pergasol family of direct paper dyes are water-soluble synthetic dyes with amine groups, providing a net positive charge that readily bonds to cellulosic surfaces.
Bleaching Agents
Bleaching agents are chemicals used to whiten or decolorize materials by reacting with their chromophores, the molecules that are responsible for their color. They can be oxidizing or reducing agents and act on different parts of the chromophores.
Chlorine bleaching produces toxic by-products such as dioxins and furans, which have been linked to cancer, asthma, and other diseases. Therefore, many environmental organizations require that paper be bleached with safer options such as hydrogen peroxide or ozone.
Before chlorine was discovered, bleaching was done by exposure to sunlight. But this process took a long time and used up large amounts of water. In addition, the lignin in the raw pulp would break down and weaken the cellulose molecules. By using chemical pulping and bleaching agents, lignin is removed and clean, white paper is made.
Fourdrinier Machine
The Fourdrinier Machine is the dominant paper making machine of today. It is used to make a wide range of paper grades, including notebooks. The Fourdrinier machine uses various fillers to give paper a smooth, opaque quality. It also incorporates bleaching agents to achieve the desired whiteness and optical brightening agents to add a pleasing shine.
To produce a ton of traditional paper requires 18 trees, 2770 liters of water, and a few bleaches. To make a ton of stone paper, however, requires just one rock.
Global Equipment International, LLC sells several Fourdrinier machines, including the headbox that evenly distributes pulp slurry onto a fourdrinier table at the beginning of the machine and the forming section that condenses layers of pulp slurry into thicker grades of paper.