Making a sheet by hand and by machine follows the same steps. First, separate the useful fibers from the raw material. Then beat them into pulp. Next, adjust the properties of the paper with additives. Screen the mixture onto a mesh, then press and dry the mat of fibers; the machine just does the steps continuously. Cellulose is a long chain of glucose sugar units; it is a polysaccharide, and it is the most abundant organic polymer on Earth. Plants build it into their cell walls; that is why wood, cotton and many other plants have it and can be used to make paper.

The oldest papyrus documents found so far are the Diary of Merer. In them, a work crew leader describes his team's last years of work on the Great Pyramid of Giza; the papers date from about 2560 to 2550 BCE. They were dug up in 2012 and 2013 at an ancient harbor on the Red Sea coast. Papermaking reached the Islamic world in the 8th century. There it was refined, and machinery was designed for bulk manufacturing. Production began in Samarkand, Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Morocco and then Muslim Spain. Muslim papermakers found a way to make a thicker sheet, which helped turn papermaking from an art into a major industry.

Paper did not catch on in Europe at first; it had few advantages over papyrus, parchment or vellum. Demand rose in the 1400s with movable type printing; many paper mills started up to meet the need for something cheap to print on. Cotton paper, linen paper and other rag papers were the usual kind in Europe until wood pulp took over. Hemp and linen rags were the main source of pulp at first. Cotton took over from the late 1700s. More of it became available from India and American plantations. Charles Fenerty of Nova Scotia invented newsprint in 1844 by pulping spruce wood; he sent a sample to a Halifax newspaper to show that paper could be made from wood. Newsprint is cheap and strong enough for fast presses; it is not made to last.

Wood is the biggest source of paper today. Pulpwood and other tree products make up more than 95 percent of the world's pulp production, as of November 2026; that is a big change from the rags and plant bark used for most of the history of paper before the 1800s. Mechanical pulping grinds or shreds wood into fibers without removing the lignin. So more than 95 percent of the wood ends up in the pulp; the price is that lignin makes the paper turn yellow and brittle. Mechanical pulp also has short fibers that make weak paper. In the groundwood process, whole debarked logs are pressed against rotating stones to tear out the fibers. In thermomechanical pulping, wood is chipped and fed into steam-heated refiners. There the chips are squeezed and converted to fibers between two steel discs.

Wood pulp for paper comes from forests of different kinds; one estimate says pulp tree plantations give 16 percent of the world's pulp, and old-growth forests give 9 percent. Other forests give the rest. Reforestation is practiced in most areas, which means forests are replanted after trees are cut. As of November 2026, a third of the United States is forested, about 766 million acres. Tissue makers in the United States use wood that is not good for building materials, plus recycled paper. About 90 percent of them use recycled paper. In 2024 they used about 3.8 million tons of it. So the forests and the recycling bins both feed the paper mills.

Words to know

• cellulose: plant fiber stuff
• papyrus: old reed paper
• newsprint: newspaper paper
• reforestation: replanting forests