Use Of Recycled Paper example essay topic

In the 1790's members of the industry in both Paris and London were working on inventions to try to mechanism paper-making. In England John Dickenson produced the cylinder machine that was operational by 1809. Although useful for smaller enterprises, this lacked the large scale potential of the machine resulting from the invention of Nicholas-Louis Robert in Paris, which had a more complicated incubation period. The last of the early improvements to this machine were financed by the Fourdrinier brothers in London, and it was after these brothers that the machine was named.

The Fourdrinier could produce paper of virtually any size for the very first time, limited only by the width of the continuous wire mesh upon which the paper was made. It has been estimated that this machine could produce 40,680 14'x 18's he ets in 12 hours - the production equivalent of 8 hand-operated vats - thus reducing the price of some papers by about two-thirds. A watershed had been reached which led to a rapid increase in other mechanical developments and improvements. The change-over to new technologies was, however, gradual. A few mills using the old hand-made methods continued to function until relatively recently. One mill, Woo key Hole in Somerset, still operates on a small scale but this is largely for tourist purposes.

This is slightly counterbalanced by one or two new hand-operated mills that have opened in recent years. The scarcity of paper-making materials had been a problem from the very beginning and it had been necessary to import rags from the Continent in large quantities. (15) The 1666 Burying in Wool Act, introduced to promote the wool trade, also made more linen rags available to the paper-makers. However, the problem of a shortage of paper-making materials remained pressing.

The 18th century saw much experimentation with plant materials, both in Britain and on the Continent. (16) Even a few unlikely non-plant substances such as asbestos were tried. Observations of wasps' nests also raised some early interest in the possibility of wood as a potential paper-making material. By about 1716 jute (17) was beginning to be used, mainly in the form of the coarse textile sacking that was commonly made from this Asian plant. Cotton (18) rags - previously few and far between, so very seldom used - became common after the 1790's. This came about as a result of the invention of the cotton-gin in America which speeded up production, and of the spinning-jenny that made Britain a producer rather than an importer of cotton fabric.

Cotton waste from the mills also became a major new source. Straw, (19) the leaves and stems of cereal grasses such as rye, barley, wheat or rice, which had always been used in small quantities, became much more extensively utilised from the 1840's. The use of recycled paper also became, like straw, used much more widely. The 1840's saw the introduction of esparto, (20) or al fa grass, (imported from southern Spain and North Africa), and manila hemp. (21) Manila is a plaint ain type of plant related to the banana the strong fibres of which were, and still are, used extensively to make ropes and sails. Esparto, producing a fine weak paper, steadily assumed importance for both stationery and printing papers right up until the 1950's.

It was only substituted with straw during the two World Wars when imports of esparto ceased. It is worth noting that a paper made of a single fibre type was always a relative rarity so that these new introduction's resulted in even more heterogeneous papers. Experiments with ground wood-pulp also began in the 1840's. It was not long, however, before it appeared that without the removal of the lignin (22), (which gives wood its strength) and the natural resins, the paper very quickly deteriorated. (23) Experiments to improve the wood-pulps, which were mostly of pine or spruce woods, began in the 1850's with chemical treatments to remove the lignin and resins. The various processes, predominantly of an alkaline nature, began with the Soda Process in which caustic soda was used.

The second process, introduced in the 1860's and 1870's was, however, acidic: this was the Sulphate Process which used sulphurous acid and its salts, such as bisulphate of lime, magnesia or soda, to break down the wood chips. The Sulphate Process, which followed in the 1880's, most commonly utilized sulphate of soda to achieve the same result. By the turn of the century these chemical wood-pulps were producing some very good results using either a single, or a combination of methods, and often with a mixture of fibre types. Untreated wood-pulps, so called mechanical wood, or ground wood, continue to be used for very cheap papers such as newspapers..