The speaker mainly discusses ______. [originaltext] In the early 1800s, the

In the early 1800s, the paper industry was still using rags as its basic source of fiber as it had for many centuries. However, the rag supply couldn’t keep up with the growing demand for paper. The United States alone was using 250 thou sand tons of rags each year. And a quarter of that had to be imported. It was clear that a new source of fiber was needed to keep up with the demand for paper. The answer to this problem turned out to be paper made from wood pulp, something that was abundantly available in North America. In Canada, the first wood pulp mill was set up in 1866, and it was immediately successful. But while wood pulp solved the problem of quantity, it created a problem of quality. Wood contains a substance called lignin. The simplest way to make large quantities of cheap paper involves leaving the lignin in the wood pulp. But lignin is acidic and its presence in paper has shorted the life expectancy of paper from several centuries for rag paper to less than a century for paper made from wood pulp. This means that books printed less than a hundred years ago are already turning yellow and beginning to disintegrate, even though books printed much earlier may be in fine condition. This is bad enough for the older books on your bookshelf, and it poses a huge problem for libraries and the collections of government documents, too.