How to Make a Paper Towel

Begin collecting waste paper from trash bins or office trash cans, you can ask local businesses for their shredded paper, which is great to begin with. You may also want to add vegetable fibers such as celery, wheat, straw or bamboo, then cut fibers into fine strands and tear paper into tiny pieces. Place all the paper and fibers into a large pot and cover with boiling water, then add a caustic solution to remove any impurities.

Place the pot on the stove and simmer for two to five hours, then drain the liquid and repeat the same process again. The paper materials should become a fatty pulp of mass and any dirt or impurities should separate itself from the fatty pulp. Remove any of these impurities with a strainer and carefully mix the pulp with clean water and place into a blender to shred the crude mixture.

Paper towels are often bleached during this process to make the towel whiter by adding a small amount of bleach to the paper pulp or the use of colored fabric dyes are used to produce color in the towel. Some brands contain a low level of resin or binder (glue that keeps the fibers from falling apart when they become wet.) This is what paper towel manufacturers call "wet strength," or "Bounty tough," as consumers are familiar with.

Expensive paper towel brands contain an additive that will make the paper towel feel "soft" rather than the "Bounty tough." While blending, the pulp mass should become a semi-liquid fibrous material, then the creamy pulp is poured into a tub and more water is added for consistency. Then the pulp is ready to be placed into casting or moulding with the deckle frame attached.

The deckle frame is fit over the mould to prevent excess pulp from spilling out and the mould and deckle frame is given a shake, two ways to intertwine and crisscross the fibers. Patterns of shapes such as squares, diamonds or other images are often imprinted into the paper towel to help hold the moisture in. Most paper towel rolls are manufactured with two layers of thin paper and the more layers the towels have, the stronger the paper towel.

After a thin piece of pulp and felt has been formed on the mould, the sheet of towel is allowed to drain for a short time, then the process is repeated, removing of the felt, stacking up piles of these sheets, until the desired strength of paper towel is formed. The mould is lifted and the piles are now ready to be pressed and squeezed of any excess water.

The paper is then placed in the open air to dry slowy. Once the thin sheets of paper are dried, they are cut into different sizes. Sizing may be done with one tablespoon of corn starch or unflavored gelatin, or any other starchy substances. The sheets of paper are placed in trays of gelatin sizing, then the process of pressing and drying procedure is repeated over and over again until the paper is dried completely.

Continue the series of steps for the paper forming process of pressing to remove water between the rolls and felts, then drying to achieve a certain moisture level, and the calendering process where the paper is compacted and smoothed as it is rolled or cut into sheets. Another method for paper towel making is to use toilet paper with liquid starch, a bowl, screen, cookie sheet, towel, and a heavy book. While the processing method is the same, the materials used are less.