All about paper roll cutting

Paper is all around us in our daily lives, and the digital age is still far from over. But while it is very easy to get hold of it, we rarely think about how it gets to us. However, for those who distribute paper in various formats or use a lot of paper to package their products or to produce various media, it is important to be able to count on an industry that can supply them with a raw material that meets all their requirements. Paper processing and reel cutting is a little-known process that serves many market players. What is paper reel cutting, what are the processes, for what applications and for whom, here is an overview of an industrial sector that deserves to be highlighted.

Paper creation and paper roll cutting processes

However, if we are to start with a huge banality, it is worth mentioning that, in order to cut paper reels, the reels must first be shaped. This is all the more interesting to mention that paper reeling is increasingly done by recycling, which consumes six times less water than a new product, with, at the base, the recovery of waste paper that will be reprocessed to be transformed back into paper pulp. The pulp is then put into reels. The waste will be bathed in various tanks, treated, decontaminated and then soaked in water before being dried using machines that will compress the newly created paper. It is at this stage that the weight of the shaped paper is determined, down to the micron. The coating and laminating processes will then improve the printability of the paper, making it more or less smooth or glossy. Finally, to facilitate industrial production and cutting, the resulting sheets of paper, often several hundred metres long, are collected in the form of reels. The first machine, called the drum, will produce a mother reel. It consists of a winding support (metal cylinder or thick cardboard), which receives the sheets of paper. The winding support can support up to ten tonnes of weight and can be up to ten metres wide. However, as the mother reels are almost impossible to store, they are transformed into daughter reels. This is where the slitting comes in. The reels are thus paper cutting machines. Equipped with automated cutting systems, they cut the parent reels into reels of smaller size and weight. These are the daughter reels. These daughter reels will have a different width (the width of the material web), and a different length, depending on the formats to be created.

Sectors concerned by the cutting of paper reels

The first sector concerned by paper cutting is obviously the manufacturers themselves. Having a high-performance machine park and creating daughter reels of various sizes is a technical know-how that these companies put forward to meet all demands. Industrial slitting thus encompasses various methods. The cutting of coils consists of creating several daughter coils from the mother coil, all of which will have the same diameter and, naturally, the same length when unrolled. And, of course, it is possible to cut daughter coils of different widths from a parent coil. Among the slitting machines, there are also rewinders, slitters and unwinders. These machines are used to cut the length of the parent reels to reduce their diameter. It is thus possible to intervene on both the width and the length of the reels. These different machines and processes give paper manufacturers a great deal of flexibility when it comes to offering cut-to-size paper. Different types of paper are naturally of interest to the retail sector. As consumers of packaging paper for transporting goods and for packaging, particularly food packaging, the retail sector needs volumes of cut paper made to measure. For packaging and wrapping, paper cutting machines can produce and cut all kinds of paper, from kraft for simple wrapping and overwrapping to silk or tissue paper for the most delicate products, all in reels of various sizes. For logistics, the retail sector may also need palletising interleaves to stabilise products on pallets during transport. Paper types that can be produced in large quantities and with different grammages on request.

Cutting paper coils, an outlet for tube manufacturers

At the same time, the paper reel cutting business itself needs tubes around which to wrap the reels before they are cut. The paper industry is one of the main outlets for tube manufacturers. To match the performance of paper cutting machines, tube manufacturers are now looking to produce high strength tubes that will both withstand heavy weights and allow for increased speed for better productivity. Industrial paper cutting companies and tube manufacturers are even working in symbiosis. For example, modern winders for newsprint make very high demands on the tubes used. Specific strength, ultra-precise dimensions and concentricity characteristics are all designed to ensure quality winding. The same adaptability is required for corrugated paper. This time, the tubes must be designed to work perfectly with the rewinder and to adapt to the time the paper is passing through the corrugator. Between specific needs for its own operation and providing solutions for other sectors, reel cutting is a real cog in the industry that must constantly modernise, reinvent itself, take account of new challenges and without which it would be very difficult to imagine our lifestyles today.