Paper mill

A paper mill is a factory that turns vegetable fiber such as wood pulp or old rags into paper, a process craftsmen once carried out by hand, sheet by sheet. The earliest documented water-powered paper mill was built in 1282 at Xativa in the Crown of Aragon under King Peter III, though some scholars think Islamic papermakers may have harnessed waterpower even earlier, and the first such mill north of the Alps was built at Nuremberg by Ulman Stromer in 1390; unlike Chinese and Arab papermakers, who relied on human and animal labor, it was Europe that mechanized the craft. A modern paper mill can run a single machine 150 meters long, producing sheets ten meters wide at speeds over ninety-seven kilometers an hour, either as an integrated site that makes its own pulp or as a mill that buys pulp in.