What are Paper Mills?
Paper is a basic commodity which everyone is very familiar with. Its universal presence and simple nature belie the complicated processes involved in papermaking. Paper mills are factories which manufacture paper from wood pulp and other ingredients. Some paper mills are integrated, meaning that wood pulp is made on the same site as the finished product. While paper has been around for thousands of years in one form or another, the first standardized process for paper manufacture was invented in China in 105 BCE. Modern paper mills use large amounts of energy, water, and wood pulp in a highly complex and mechanized process to produce a sheet of paper. A papermaking machine can be very large — up to 500 feet (152 m) in length. Raw or uncut spools of fresh paper can be up to 33 feet (10m) in width. The basic raw material which integrated paper mills work with is wood. At the beginning of the whole process, wooden logs are passed through a machine which strips off their bark, and then in
According to the University of Alberta Libraries website, a paper mill is “a term applied to providers of pre-written term papers and other “educational tools” via the Internet. Some web sites offer thousands of papers online.” Simply put, a paper mill is a place on the web where students can download papers on a wide variety of topics. Some paper mills such as BigNerds.com offer term papers for free. These sites are generally divided according to topic. Other paper mills operate on a trade basis – in order to recieve a paper, a student must submit a paper. Many other paper mills charge for access to their papers. Prices can range anywhere from $5 an essay, to $20 a page. There are hundreds of paper mills on the Internet. For a list of many of them, see Kimbel Library’s site on Internet Paper Mills.
