DIFFERENT WAYS FOR FINISHING THE TOILET PAPER

Until not so much years ago, a toilet paper roll was simply made in two ply smooth tissue.

Just a simple embossing and the presence of knurl (also called crimping or ply-bonding) were interesting only for high-level market.

Actually, tissue produced at that time was highly soft, so you did not need anything else to get bulky rolls of a pleasing-use material. 

If you wanted something else, a simple "rice grain" embossing was enough and it was, let say,first innovation in this field.

When paper mills needed to increase productivity of machines, they begun to produce tissues less elastic and less soft than before. For that reason, converting companies had to invent someting to get paper soft and pleased enough, anyway. Solution was find in so-called "micro-embossing": you use embossing cylinders engraved with much more points (60-70 per square centimeter) than those present in a traditional embosser. That makes tissue pretty soft (but you don't get a particularly bulky roll).

Technology made big steps to manage the process of the double micro-embossing: each ply is separed to the other one (whenever you don't use two unwinders, each one for a different one-ply paper parent roll) and it is embossed separately in way that embossed points of each ply are oriented to the center, so external faces of product are the better and soft ones. 

They also tried to find the best compromise between paper softness and roll bulkyness : one way to get that is to use some "medium-micro" embossing cylinder (40-50 points/square-cm) having different patterns like small rhombs.

Since few years ago, kitchen towels lamination technology permitted to produce paper rolls with two, three and more micro-embossed and glued ply . Advantages are many: you can use thiner tissues (because glue helps you to get a suitable strong and soft material); finished roll is highly bulky.

Last trend consists in to glue and emboss the paper not on all surface of it but just wherever embossing cylinder touches the paper ply. The embossing cylinder is usually engraved with flowers, geometric patterns or other patterns. If you add some ink to the glue, finished roll will be still better.

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