Inside the Trafford Park factory that makes millions of toilet rolls a day (2025)

How a 'hair dryer' turns a 'smoothie' into kitchen towel and toilet roll

Did you know you need to make a giant paper smoothie and put it through a hair dryer to make your toilet roll?

You probably don’t give much thought to where your toilet roll or paper kitchen towel comes from. But in Trafford Park there’s a 200-strong team that can churn out as many as 4.5 million toilet rolls every single day.

Like your paper soft and luxurious? Then you’ll like the paper made at Essity’s mill, on its £20m line that opened in 2020 and helped it meet the nation’s massive demand for toilet roll as people emptied supermarket shelves to stockpile supplies during the pandemic.

As the Manchester Evening News saw on its tour of Trafford Park, that line turns wood pulp into what look like the biggest toilet rolls you’ve ever seen– man-high 50-kilometre rolls of paper that each weigh 1.2 tonnes.

Those rolls are then fed into the next round of hi-tech machinery to become the kitchen rolls and toilet paper we all use. The Trafford Park site makes household name brands like Cushelle toilet roll and Plenty kitchen towel, as well as own-brand products for supermarkets.

Giuseppe Di Benedetto, who took over as mill manager this year, took us on a tour of the site to show us how the household paper products we rely on are actually made.

Work at Trafford Park starts when blocks of white wood pulp are put onto a conveyor belt and then mixed with water and shredded into a thick white pulp with giant blades.

“It's similar to a blender,” Giuseppe said. “What is the pulp for us? It's feed for the paper machine. So we create this sort of smoothie between pulp and water, and we feed the paper machine.”

Now that “smoothie” is fed into the gigantic, loud Through Air Drying (TAD) machine –whose job is to get the water out of that pulp and turn it into paper, using vacuums and hot air.

Giuseppe said: “So in this stage of paper creation we have more or less 95% water content in pulp, and then the mission is to get water content down to 5% – that is the humidity content on normal paper production."

Tony Kay, organisational improvement manager and a 30-year veteran of the Trafford Park site, said part of the process was like a giant “hair dryer”, blowing hit air through the sheets of paper to dry them out.

Most of the products made at Trafford Park use the paper made on that TAD machine. Guiseppe and Tony say the hot air drying technique makes a thicker, softer paper than other manufacturing techniques. As you’ll know if you’ve seen any adverts for kitchen roll or toilet paper, that is a key selling point.

Tony said: “What comes with thickness is absorbence, which is the key thing that we sell.”

At the end of the TAD process, that pulp smoothie has been turned into a 1.2 tonne toll of paper. Each of those rolls is then moved into the £20m production linen next door, where work starts to turn it into the products we take home.

Guiseppe said: “This is the newest line we have in this mill, built in 2020 for an investment of £20m. It's honestly one of the important sustainable investments that we did in our factories because it's able to produce a roll without the inner core, which means we are reducing the waste in our houses.

“We can do whatever we want on this line because it’s very new. We can do kitchen roll, we can do toilet paper roll… what the market is asking for, we are able to produce.”

Through a series of whirring automated machines, that roll of paper is stretched, layered, embossed, glued together, rolled and sliced to become the products we use.

On our visit, the line was making kitchen roll. We watched as two sheets of paper were layered on top of each other, glued lightly together, and then rolled into rolls that looked like the roll you’d see in your kitchen – except that each roll was as wide as your kitchen.

After each giant roll is rolled it moved to a large storage tower in the middle of the production line, where the rolls are shuffled up and down as they wait for the most dramatic part of the process – the blades.

You can watch through glass as those long rolls are fed through a whirling robotic blade that slices them into standard size kitchen rolls. It’s so smooth that it’s hard to remember how powerful the blade is – you’ll know how hard it is to rip up a thick wad of paper, so a blade that can cut through an entire roll has to be very sharp and have a lot of power behind it.

And those blades do a lot of cutting, all day long. Giuseppe said: “At this moment we are producing 34,000 tonnes of paper. We are able of course to increase our output, up to 48,000 tones. That means able to produce 4.5million toilet rolls per day.”

During Covid, when people stocked up on toilet rolls and suppliers were racing to meet demand, the plant was operating at full capacity. Tony said: “We couldn't make enough. The shelves as you know were empty!”

Many of the products made are coreless – they are made by wrapping the paper around a narrow plastic core, which can then be removed before the rolls are cut down to size. But the plant does also have a cardboard roll machine, which feeds cores into the centre of more traditional products.

Once the rolls are cut, they are sent down the line to be shrinkwrapped, packed into boxes and pallets by robot arms, and then sent out to distributors or direct to retailers.

What’s noticeable about the whole process is how few people there are on the line. Giuseppe said: “The only interaction between the machine and people is because we need to feed the machine with material, but the rest, if the machine is running well, people are there to check the product, to check the machine, to check if everything is going well, and that's it.”

The plant employs 220 people – and it’s a highly skilled workforce that keeps those complex machines going. Tony said: “It's easy to look at it and think 'it's all automated', but the guys working on it, they go through a hell of a lot of training. We've got guys on the machine that have been working on the machine for 20, 25 years.”

The Essity mill was originally a Procter & Gamble site, focusing on making candles and soap. The first Pampers factory in the UK opened in 1991 as part of the huge P&G complex, which first started making tissue towel in 2000.

Swedish giant SCA took over P&G paper production operations in 2007. P&G still owns the Pampers plant next door.

In 2017, SCA spun out its hygiene products arm into a separate business, Essity, which is headquartered in Stockholm.

Guiseppe and Tony are proud the mill has many long-serving workers. Tony said: “I'm not the longest serving here. I wouldn't say I'm average but at 32/33 years there's a lot of people who have been here longer than me. There's fathers and sons… and some third generation people as well.”

But Essity is also keen to encourage apprentices and young talent to join the factory, and to take charge of these complex processes that create the products we all use every day.

Tony said: “We have instances of apprentices coming through the system who are senior directors in Europe now. So there is a lot of growth and a lot of opportunities for people.”