02 - My first paper pulp

 My first attempt at making some paper pulp was a voyage of discovery in a lot of ways. I made some mistakes along the way - the first of which was to use a cardboard box, rather than just scrap paper, but I learned an awful lot about that cardboard box - probably more than the average person would ever really want to know!

This is the box that I started with. The first step is generally to shred your base material - first lesson learned… I’d recommend trying to tear it first. This box was actually quite difficult to tear, other than at a creased fold, and when it did tear, I found that all the colour and printing was in a plastic coating. Had I just put the box through a shredder or cut it with a knife or scissors, I wouldn’t have known this until I found hundreds of tiny bits of the plastic coating in my pulp, and the pulp rendered unusable.

Thankfully, once recognised, the plastic coating was relatively easy to strip off the cardboard, leaving me with the bare cardboard underneath. This comprised of two layers - the brown structural card, and a thin papery layer of cream coloured card which showed through the plastic coloured coating. The first picture shows all three layers (plastic coating, cream coloured layer, and the brown structural card), while the second shows what I was left with after the plastic had been stripped off.

Now I was able to shred the card, though I was just tearing it up as small as I could manually. This was made a bit easier by dampening the cardboard underneath, and that also separated the white and brown layers pretty well too. Another lesson learned here… I should have kept the two colours of card separated rather than pulping them both together… the whiter layer would possibly have been a source of material for a brighter pulp than I ultimately finished up with (I still have another of these boxes, so I might try making a pulp purely from the white part next time).

Having torn up the card as small as I could, I dumped it all in a glass jar with some water, and left it for a week, giving it a good shake every day to try and break the pulp down a bit more, but it wasn’t playing nicely 😕 At the end of a week, I was still left with this…

Hah! So paper pulp floats… go figure!

As you can see, the cream coloured card hasn’t broken down much at all, and the brown card is still fairly lumpy.

As I don’t have a dedicated blender yet, I tried making my own blades thing on a long bolt, that I could fix in my drill, and used that to ‘blitz’ my pulp, but it made very little difference at all. I don’t think my cordless drill spins fast enough, but given the amount of water splashing about, I wasn’t game to try my mains operated drill.

So, being the impatient person I am, I reluctantly decided to use my smoothie blender, just this once (and washed it out very thoroughly afterwards), and finally ended up with a pretty consistent mix of nice finely chopped pulp.

Next step (next post) - let’s make some paper!!