Tissue Culture

“Just cannot do without it!”. Few products can claim to have such strong cosumer backing. It seems to be an absolute essential in every corner of a typical urban home--inside the kitchen and on the bathroom shelf. It wipes everything clean. A running nose to a dirty table top. Problem is:producing it in such great volumes may wipe out our forests!! Lets track the paper trail:

 1.  Trees from virgin forests, tree farms, and second growth forests are razed and carried to the mill.

  2.  Their bark is removed and the log chipped into small sizes, mostly
1 inch x 1/4 inch, so that it is easier to pulp the wood.

 3.  These wood chips, of about 50 tonnes, are mixed with 10,000 gallons of cooking chemicals; and sent to a 60-ft tall pressure cooker called a digester.

 4.  This reduces the volume to just 15 tonnes of pulp after all the moisture is evaporated.

 5.  The pulp goes through a washer system to remove lignin (a natural wood component) and other cooking chemicals. The effluentcalled
black licquor, is then separated from the pulp.

 6.   The washed pulp is then sent to the bleach plant to remove yellow stains left by lingering lingin. The pulp is now pristine white.

  7.    The pulp is mixed with water again to produce paper stock, a 99.5 per cent water and 0.5 per cent fibre mixture.This stock is sprayed between moving mesh screens, letting the water drain, producing an 18-ft (5.5-m) wide sheet of matted fibre.The speed of production is as fast as 6,500 ft (1981 m) per minute.

  8.    The mat is then transferred to a huge hot cylinder called a Yankee Dryer. It presses and dries the paper to a final moisture content
of about 5 per cent.

  9.    The paper is scraped off the Yankee Dryer with a metal blade.This
makes the sheets soft and flexible but lowers their strength and thickness.

  10.    The paper is then loaded onto long thin cardboard tubing, which is cut into rolls and packaged to reach a store.