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If you are reading this, odds are you are reading it on our paper edition. I thought it would be a good time to explain exactly how that paper came to have these words printed on it.
The production of a newspaper requires just three raw materials. Paper, ink and content.
These words are part of the content. It takes a crew of people a lot of effort to gather and place the stories, photos and advertisements into the 307 editions we print each year.
Ink is made and shipped to the area via trucks. Our ink is soy-based. The words that you are reading right now use black ink. It's black because it has carbon added to it. A major producer of the black used in the making of ink is Orion Engineered Carbons in Belpre, but the ink itself comes from near Chicago.
The part of the newspaper equation that I have always found interesting is the paper. The type of paper newspapers are printed on is called newsprint. Nearly all of the newsprint used in North America comes from Canada.
As you may have noticed, newsprint is not the highest quality or thickest of papers. It is designed to be printed on, read, and recycled all in the span of a day.
Newsprint starts life as a tree. There are vast stands of trees in tracts deep into Canada. Around 1,000 miles north of us these giant tracts of trees are planted to be harvested to make lumber and papers decades later. This summer some of the Canadian trees caught fire and covered the northern United States with a layer of smoke. This is not their normal behavior. Normally they help to clean the air by producing oxygen and trapping carbon as they grow. The trees are replanted as soon as they are cut.
Once cut the whole tree is not used to make paper but is used to produce dimensional lumber. The next time you buy a 2×4 to build shelving, or a 4×4 post it may very well come from the same tree that a newspaper does. A cross section of a 2×4 is of course a rectangle and that of a tree is a circle. Rectangles being taken from a circle will produce triangle shaped pieces of wood that have no practical use. This is where newspapers come from.
Ground up into a pulp and mixed with some other materials, the mixture is spread very thin while it passes through heated rollers until it becomes paper. The paper is very wide, producing a roll of paper as wide as a room. For our use, the paper is cut into rolls that are either 21 inches wide or 10.5 inches wide.
Most pages of the newspaper use the 21-inch rolls where two pages are printed side by side. Single pages, like pages four and five of a six-page section, will use the 10.5 inch roll called a dink.
Regardless of the width, the roll is normally the same length. Six miles. You read that right, a roll of newsprint is 6 miles long. The six-mile rolls of newsprint are loaded onto the press in such a way that the next six-mile-long rolls will automatically get pasted onto the very end of the first roll. Eight newspaper pages can be printed onto each roll as it prints, meaning that the printing of a standard 16-page paper uses two rolls at the same time. A roll of newspaper will last around 25 minutes as it prints.
The newspaper passes through a folder that also cuts the paper every 21 inches.
Once read, a newspaper is one of the easiest to recycle materials there is. If you live in town it can go in your reycle bin, if you don't you can take it to the county recycling center on Gilman Avenue. Some people reuse it to protect their floors, others use it to keep the weeds down in their vegetable gardens.
Because newsprint is a poor conductor of heat, some countries use newspaper as insulation, which I would not recommend because it is paper and anyone that has ever started a campfire knows that it will burn.
Some newsprint is broken back down and made into new newsprint.
Newsprint and the information printed on it makes newspapers one of the oldest forms of mass communication. Unlike other forms it does not require energy to use and because of the nature of the source material actually helps the environment in the years that trees are growing to produce it.
Art Smith is online manager of The Times. He can be reached at asmith@mariettatimes.com