The collected works of ScottyB

What is it about a new toy that has you completely pre-occupied with an activity completely unrelated to an actual job description?

Right now, I feel strangely compelled to shred some paper in the new office paper shredder. It sits in the corner of the room, its shiny black carapace sheathing a wicked row of serrated, shiny, silver blades.

Like the teeth of a Great White Shark, they reveal themselves when you sentence a sheet of paper to its death. They fire into action and slice the paper into narrow lengths of rubbish, packing to be used on the next outward-bound shipment. Mere piles of nothing, barely resembling the regal, alabaster quality they once possessed. Crumpled in the bottom of the collection bin, feeling truly and utterly sorry for itself.

You almost feel for it. Until you realise it is just paper - and enthusiastically run the next sheet through.

The journey of the paper is a long one.

Workers on a special tree farm somewhere harvested the lucky tree, chosen for its ability to bear paper. The log would have been carefully transported to the paper company (in this case - Reflex) where the tree was lovingly given a bath to rinse away the dirt and other impurities before being run through a debarker (and the cuts of bark subsequently burned) and then - ironically - a large chipper, turning the log into small chips of wood.

Carefully, the chips would have been sorted according to size, and moved to the pulping operation, where they could be turned into pulp. In the pulping stage, the individual wood fibers in the chips must be separated from one another. This is accomplished with a ‘digester’. And is assisted by many chemicals, many of which I can’t pronounce.

The finished pulp looks like a mushy, watery solution.

Next, our generous tree, giving its life so we can write, has to have its pulp converted into the dry, flat, paper form we are more familiar with. After all, it would be very difficult writing on a mass of wet, claggy, paste. We would need to completely re-think our writing tools as well as how we handle paper and transport it. Really, leaving it in the pulp state is quite the logistical nightmare.

So all this means that the water has to be extracted from the wood-soup. And this occurs in the wet end of the papermaking machines.

The solution is sprayed onto a long, wide screen, called a wire. Thanks to gravity, a lot of the water begins to drain out the bottom of the wire. Meanwhile, the pulp fibers are caught on the top side of the wire, and begin to bond together in a very thin mat. The fiber mat remaining on the wire is then squeezed between felt-covered press rollers to absorb more of the water.

Even when this wet end work is over, the pulpy stuff on the wire is still about 60% water. But then, the paper moves onto the dry end.

In the dry end, huge metal cylinders are heated by filling them with steam. The wet paper, which can be up to 30 feet wide, passes through these hot rollers - sometimes dozens of them, and often in three to five groups. Heating and drying the wet sheet seals the fibers closer and closer together, turning them gradually from pulp into paper.

A paper machine called the ‘calender’ - big, heavy cast iron rollers - press the drying paper smooth and uniform in thickness, allowing it to be packed neatly into the 500-ream packs we are familiar with.

Sometimes the paper is coated, often with fine clay, to make it glossier and easier to print on. After a bit more drying, it is rolled onto a big spool and cut, to be transported to our local outlets, for purchase.

Which brings us to my office. Where I’ve been picking up a copy of an old invoice and shredding it into pieces.

The sound of the whirring blades is infectious. Everyone in the office has been looking for old scrap paper, old brochures that are outdated, invoices that are long since processed, scrap envelopes ready for recycle. And shredding them. At one stage, the boss even decided to see how many pieces of paper would go through the shredder at once - so promptly threw the entirety of an old magazine through it.

Now please excuse me while I scavenge the old newspapers from the shop next door…

Link: Reflex Paper
Link: Paper-Making