How toilet paper is made

Toilet paper is made of short fibers so that a roll falls apart in a septic tank.

stations: 6
things upstream: 34
raw sources: 9
steps from the ground: 9

The short version

Toilet paper is tissue, the lightest paper made. A machine lays a thin wet web of short fibers on a felt, presses it onto one huge steam-heated drum, then scrapes it off with a blade, which crinkles it. The crinkled sheet is embossed, layered into plies, perforated and wound onto cardboard cores.

Mix short, soft fibers

Pulp from pulpwood trees, recycled fiber, sugar cane waste or bamboo is blended into a thin slurry. Fibers are chosen short on purpose. Short fibers fall apart in a drain, and long ones hold the sheet together.

Goes in
Wood pulp Water
Form a delicate web

The slurry spreads between a wire and a fabric felt as they wrap around a roll. Almost all of the water drains through, leaving a thin, fragile web.
Glue it to a hot drum

The web is pressed from the felt onto the Yankee, a single enormous steam-heated drying cylinder under a hot air hood. The cylinder is sprayed with an adhesive so the web sticks and dries in a moment.

Goes in
Adhesive
Scrape it off crinkled

A doctor blade scrapes the dry sheet off the drum. The sheet bunches up as it comes off, and those tiny crinkles are what make tissue soft and stretchy. The glue strength, blade angle and speed set how crinkled it gets.
Emboss and ply up

Rolls of tissue are unwound together, patterned with embossing rolls and pressed so two or more plies hold to each other.
Wind, perforate and slice

The layered tissue is rolled onto cardboard tubes, and blades cut perforation lines at the right spacing. A long log of rolls is then sawn into individual rolls and wrapped.

Goes in
Cardboard

End of the lineToilet paper

Worth repeating

Chinese records show toilet paper made in volume by the early 14th century, with ten million packages a year in what is now Zhejiang.
Joseph Gayetty is widely credited with the first commercially available toilet paper in the United States, which he introduced in 1857 as flat sheets watermarked with his name.
The average American uses about 23.6 rolls of toilet paper a year.