Here are some additional GCSE and A Level project ideas to help you learn more about papermaking:
Project 1: Paper Production
Investigate how paper is made and decide what its future will be as the digital age takes hold. For this project we want you to investigate ‘the paper trail’. Imagine yourself to be an investigative journalist working for The Financial Times. You have been commissioned to write a 1000-word feature report about the industry’s future. Your audience will be economically literate readers, many of whom will own shares in paper production companies. They may be looking at switching funds to a digital start up company on the assumption that there will be no need for paper in the future. They have to decide if that is so and, if not, where the industry is likely to go.
Project 2: Paper Recycling and Recovery
Paper is a major global industry and produces over 300m tonnes of paper a year across the world. Of the fibres used to make paper in the UK, over 70% comes from recovered paper recycled by households and businesses. Because paper fibres increasingly degrade in the recycling process, new virgin fibres, often from recovered paper that has not been previously recycled, are added during the papermaking process. Without virgin fibres, from new trees, the paper cycle can neither begin nor continue. For this project, we want you to investigate one of Europe’s largest paper producers: Smurfit Kappa. Answer the question: is the papermaking industry contributing to global environmental improvements and is it a sustainable industry?