How paper is made, and what it changes

Brief

This lesson asks you to assess what the way a common product is made does to society and to the environment. The museum offers paper: how its fibres become a sheet, a workshop set up in Baghdad and what the spread of paper meant for records and books. What the process does to the environment, and other products, are for your class to investigate. ¹

What are the steps from raw material to finished product?

Choose a product from your classroom. Write its steps in order and mark each step that uses water, heat or energy. The expectation asks you to assess impacts, so the steps come first.

Who is affected when a product becomes common?

Think of the people who make, sell and use the product, and of what is left over. Which impacts can you support with evidence?

Go deeper

Think about an old rope. While it remains a rope, you cannot write across its threads as a single page ². Papermaking separates the fibres in water, gathers them into a new surface and dries it, and the fibres may come from plants, rags or old ropes ². The paper workshop in Baghdad was founded, says the encyclopedia writer Osman Ersoy, at the suggestion of al-Fadl ibn Yahya ³. The craft itself came from China, centuries before Islam ⁴.

Think about it

Paper can be made from old ropes and rags as well as from plants. Is a product that can use old materials better for a town than one that needs new plants only, and why?

Into the museum

The paper workshop in Baghdad: how fibres become a sheet, and who is said to have proposed the workshop.
Al-Fadl ibn Yahya: the administrator to whom the encyclopedia credits the proposal.

Try this

Read about the paper workshop in Baghdad. List the materials the record says the fibres may come from, then the steps of making a sheet in order.