technical information
Chemical Information
Ecological Information
- My pulps are all made with municipal drinking water, from the City of Northampton, MA, U.S.A.
- The collected plant material is cooked with washing soda, and rinsed by machine, after being neutralized with household vinegar.
- Some of my pulps are made without a beater, by action of chlorine bleach. The bleach is rinsed out before sheet formation. Most of my pulps are bleached after beating, and then formed into paper or pigmented.
- My paper has calcium carbonate added to the pulp as a buffer while it is beaten, and starch added for sizing after beating. These two chemicals make the paper archival, (for which there is no legal standard) more or less. If you need the paper to meet legal standards for permanent paper, this may not.
- No laboratory testing has been done on my pulps or papers. (If you do any, I would love to know the results!)
Ecological Information
- My pulp and papers are made in an artisan workshop, with tools as low tech as I can manage.
- Plants are harvested by hand with knives or sickles, and transported by van. Some are harvested less than 2 miles from the studio, some one block down the street; some harvested on my property, some about 5 miles away. Trimmed parts of invasive plants are composted in areas where the plants already grow. All other waste plant materials are composted for garden use. Non invasive plants are harvested around the neighborhood, except for corn. That comes from a farm in the next county over. Maybe 12 miles away.
- Cooking of plants is done on high efficiency induction cookers, in stainless steel pots.
- All of my electricity is generated by a utility using only renewable wind and solar.This website uses mostly solar energy for its servers.
- Soak and fermentation water is poured on the garden.
- Cooking liquor is sent to the water treatment plant via the municipal sewer system, as is used bleach. My volume of use of the household chemicals of washing soda, vinegar and bleach is roughly equal to a household washing diapers for an infant.
- Here in New England, we usually have plentiful water. Still, I am mindful of conservation, and annually use an amount roughly equal to one adult's shower per day. I have consistently and successfully worked to lower my water use, and I reduce overall production in drought years.