Papermaking 101

There are three types of pulp that are used to make tissue paper:  Grade 1 contains long narrow fibers from northern softwood trees, Grade 3 contains relatively short fat fibers from southern softwood trees, and Grade 4 contains even shorter fibers from hardwood trees.  These three grades are mixed together to make "furnish" for the paper machines.  Each grade imparts a different characteristic to the finished paper.  Grade 1 provides tensile strength, the resistance of the paper to being pulled apart by two opposing forces.  Grade 3 provides porosity, which translates to absorbency, and is measured by drawing air through a test sample.  Grade 4 is cheap filler, which tends to reduce both tensile strength and porosity.  The mix that we used to make tissue grade paper that was a component of our disposable diapers was largely Grade 3, maybe 70%.  Grade 1 usually ran about 20%, and the rest was Grade 4.  There are a number of ways to increase tensile strength in the finished product, one of which is to increase the percentage of Grade 1 in the mix.  If your porosity is running low, you can increase the Grade 3, and if it's too high you can increase the Grade 4.

I don't know this for a fact, but to my experienced hands, toilet paper seems to have less tensile strength and more porosity than the tissue we used to make at our paper mill. This leads me to believe that they use a lot of Grade 3 to make it.  Southern softwoods are plantation grown in the southeastern U.S.  They are planted in rows, the whole stand is harvested at the same time, and a new crop is planted right in behind the old one.  Grade 4 is produced from low quality, relatively fast growing hardwood trees like Aspen.  Grade 1 is mostly wild grown Canadian spruce, a tree that produces relatively low grade lumber compared to pine or Douglas fir.  While it might be possible to over harvest Canadian spruce, this is the first I ever heard of anybody actually doing it.

Paper is highly recyclable, but it degrades somewhat in the process, so high grade paper can be made into a lower grade, but not the other way around.  Tissue can be made from other tissue, writing paper, milk cartons, paper plates, paper cups, but not from newspaper or brown paper bags.  Recycled paper can be mixed with virgin fiber to achieve most required characteristics, so it's not a question of either-or.  The same with bamboo shoots, cotton linters, old rags, and anything else that contains cellulose fibers.  I think the determining factors are cost and availability.  Procter & Gamble originally got into the paper business to use up all the cotton linter fiber that they were generating by producing cotton seed oil.  It worked so well for them that they were using up the cotton waste faster than they were generating it, so they started buying trees.

Three rolls per week sounds about right, I don't know how Old Dog gets by with less than that.  Single ply tissue is not just cheap, it's the only kind you can use if you have a septic tank and drain field.  You don't want to flush facial tissue either because it has "wet strength" and takes forever to break down.