Final Post

By Joyce Zheng

Final Project: Remade Paper 

Inspirations

I can often see my friends complaining in social media that they are producing “academic trash” every day. I see piles of paper go to the professor’s paper box which collects essays, but then where the paper go? Probably a real trash bin. What’s more, Tracey once posted a message in the group chat says if anyone wants the poster as scratch paper. Countless posters are hung on the whiteboard and sometimes they just fall and frighten me. I learned the basic knowledge of making paper (Cai Lun) when I was in primary school, and I started to think if I can do something about paper for my final project.

I looked up some researches and reports online about the phenomenon of paper waste. From “Paper Steps on Campus”, “Today in the United States only 50% of office paper is recovered for recycling. The majority of the rest is lost to landfills or incinerators.” Going back to the guest lecture from Mr.Brubaker and the known pollution influence of incinerators, paper can also be regarded as a significant polluting source. Besides, this passage argues that “47% of campuses surveyed have set goals to improve purchasing environmentally sound goods. Environmentally-conscious purchasing can result in less waste, increased cost-saving measures, energy conservation resulting in positive climate change, and overall awareness on campus of the necessity to conserve and reduce.” The article raises examples of creating visual installation by collecting printed but not taken away paper on the campus to remind people of their waste on paper, and so on. I went to the campus store to ask how many notebooks they sell every week/month, they didn’t give me a specific number, but “pretty much”. Bioenergy Consult also provides different methods of reusing paper, including making your subscription digital and double-sided printing, which I think is feasible inside a college (if we don’t consider the energy-use on your digital devices). In conclusion, paper waste is a serious thing around the world, and it cannot be ignored inside colleges as well. 

Experiments

For the specific process of remaking paper, I first go to Youtube to see if there’s any tutorial. The videos help me a lot and are one of my biggest inspirations. Following the tutorial, I made two deckles (the first one does not work well because it is too big) with Marcela and Andy’s help. I met a few challenges when making the deckle, including the size of it and also the material selection of the filter screen. 

I mainly had 3 big experiments on the making of paper. For the first experiment, I tried to see if I can make paper out of printed paper and I recorded most parts of my process in a video.

Check the first experiment and video

For the second experiment, I remade a deckle and tested the application of different pigments. I added around 1 drop of violet pigment into the blender and repeat the experiment process in experiment 1. 

Check the second experiment  

So far, I was not satisfied with what I got through the two experiments. For the final experiment, I took suggestions from Marcela and Ben to use the heat press to dry my paper and it worked pretty well. I also used a pile of posters of a certain color to test if it can give the remade paper a certain color and added leaves as decorations into the paper.

Check the third experiment 

For the final product, after a long time (about 3 days) of drying and flattening in a magazine, I got the final product pretty successfully. The texture on it and the touch are pretty good despite some fissure on the paper caused by the drying process. And due to limitation of time, I cannot make enough pieces of paper that can form a notebook: but they do work well as postcards. Sopia suggested to me that I could make a journal out of this kind of paper which would be amazing, which is also good advice. 

                

Implementation and Significance

Regarding how the project can be implemented in Shanghai or any other place, it is easy to do as long as you follow the tutorial. Personally speaking, using an old photo frame would be much easier to implement than making a deckle than yourself since not everyone has the tools that we have in the wood lab. All you need for the experiment are shredder (if you don’t have, just cut the paper into pieces as small as possible), the deckle (photo frame would work well), blender, drying tool (towel, sponge) and water. This can be easily done at home. However, concerning the fact that you don’t have that much waste paper in your home, it will be more feasible at schools and offices. I am not sure if I make good pieces of paper out of old paper can educate people and raise awareness of environmental issues in what way, but when remaking paper, I would assume that people will think “oh old paper can function and be reused in this way…” and then, maybe, reflecting on their use of paper. I am thinking about printing words like “this used to be 4 posters, and they are wasted” on the paper I made so that people who use them are aware of its origin and the environmental problem paper has brought.

Conclusion

In my first week response, I said: “But the plastic pollution is a global issue, and all the human beings who have used plastic should be responsible. (Though I don’t know what we should do either :p).” I still – somehow don’t know what we should do, but no matter for the art installation I have done for my midterm project or the experiment process I do for my final project, they function as a tool to raise people’s awareness and seek a new way to recycle/reuse existing materials. People may not know what they are doing, but should be on the way to explore what they should do. Going back to the project, to be honest, I am a little surprised by the final paper I got, they are in pretty good quality and I never thought that I can turn a few old posters into a piece of paper like this. 

There are further improvements can be done as well. An IMA professor (Prof. Minsky?) suggests to me that I can do more research on fiber: can I remake something else?  From Wikipedia, “some people and groups advocate using field crop fiber or agricultural residues instead of wood fiber as being more sustainable”, and carbohydrates including cellulose and hemicellulose, lignin, proteins, SiO2 are all ingredients that can be used in pulping. Therefore, testing a new recipe for making paper is feasible. The problem is since the paper is a huge consumption, the current technology to produce paper is possibly the one with the lowest cost. 

About raising the awareness part as I have mentioned, I once considered using all the waste paper to make an installation by the technique I found from Ten Thousand Villages. The website provides many fantastic ideas about how to deal with waste paper.  However, since it is a commercial product, I didn’t find a tutorial and go back to remade paper. But it is a good direction for remaking paper. Eva also suggested that I should try to remake the remade paper which is an amazing idea, but since what I got before the remade paper is just the thing inside the blender with more water, I think it will not be a problem to remake from remade paper. 

 

The class shows me so many aspects that I will never know living inside the “beautiful” and “clean” city or academic building. The waste we produce every day is beyond my imagination, and though I have heard of the serious pollution in China brought by the burning of straw, how we treat those trash still shocks me. We cannot launch an initiative globally, but we can have campaign inside the school, and collect useful trash like paper/plastic we make every day, use our bottles instead of plastic bottles, and think about what we can do with the left plastic treasure. 

At the end of the end, sincere thanks to everyone who has helped me during the class 😀