How paper is made

Paper is made of tiny threads from trees, all tangled together and squashed flat.

Chop up the wood

Trees are cut into chips the size of your thumbnail.

Make a soup

The chips are cooked and stirred with water until they turn into a thin, mushy soup of tiny threads.

Pour it on a net

The soup is poured onto a moving net. The water drains through and the threads stay behind in a mat.

Squeeze and dry

Rollers squeeze the water out and hot rollers dry it. What is left is paper.

Where this comes from

Smook, Handbook for Pulp & Paper Technologists; Britannica — papermaking. Every stage above is marked with how confident we are in it, and an uncertain one says so rather than reading like the rest.

• Difficulty: industrial.
• Time: continuous process.
• Written for: for a child — Short words, five steps, no numbers.

Questions

How is paper made?

Wood becomes a suspension of fibres, the fibres are drained into a mat, and the mat is pressed and dried into a sheet. The stages above set it out at the for a child level.

Can I build this myself?

This is an industrial process rather than a home build, so it is described rather than instructed.