Blair J. Alford

If I told you that white catalog paper can have the same brightness measurement as a trendy purple sheet, you’d probably wonder from which planet I hail. But it’s true. Brightness often is a critical determinant in paper specification, but it’s an attribute whose measurement has fallen prey lately to a wide variation. That wasn’t always so. When first established, it measured the brightness of pulp by evaluating and controlling the degree of bleaching during the pulp-cooking phase of production. Pulp manufacturers used uniform processes and instrumentation to assess brightness, which resulted in an apples-to-apples comparison and a consistent standard to help classify