1. Making the pulp
The first step in kitchen towel roll production is to select the raw materials. Manufacturers use high-quality pulp from sustainable wood sources to create the tissues that will eventually become paper towel rolls. The wood chips are mixed with water and some chemicals and then "cooked" in a digester. This evaporates the water in the wood, breaking it down into cellulose, also known as pulp.
2. Treating the pulp
At this stage, the pulp has a sticky texture and needs to be washed to remove any chemicals or unwanted substances. The pulp is also treated to turn it white.
The pulp is then bales of cellulose sheets using a paper machine. During the process of forming the sheets, the water is removed, and then it is squeezed (between large rollers) and fed into the drying section of the paper mill to remove any water residues. At this point, almost all of the water has been removed.
The dry, wide, continuous tissue is then wound up to form giant mother rolls of tissue paper.
3. Layering and cutting
These giant mother rolls are then processed into kitchen towels. The specific processing method depends on the specifications of the kitchen towel being manufactured! The specifications of kitchen towels (e.g. number of plies, paper grade or weight, embossing used) can affect their performance.
For example, many kitchen towels are double-ply, meaning two layers of paper towel glued together to form a single sheet, but some – including our plastic-free kitchen towels – are triple-ply. The more plies a sheet has, the more absorbent it is.
To create a roll of kitchen towels that meet kitchen towel specifications, the towels are unrolled from a roll, passed through a series of rollers to lay them up, then glued, embossed and perforated. The perforations are done by a special machine that uses a blade that looks a bit like a comb. The blade is pressed against the kitchen towel, cutting the "teeth" into the paper. The gaps between the blade's teeth remain intact, which keeps the paper from falling apart.
The newly made kitchen towel is then wrapped around a log core (cardboard inner tube), which is very long at this point, so it needs to be chopped (using a log saw) into many different standard sizes of kitchen towels, with the ends neatly trimmed off, cut to size, glued, embossed and sealed (so it doesn't unravel again).
Finally, the coils are packaged and loaded onto pallets, ready for distribution.
