Though today's society has found a method of recycling paper, we are trying to develop a new use for paper towels that are consumed annually. Paper towels are primarily composed of cellulose. Glucose can be extracted from cellulose and then fermented to ethanol. In the literature, there are described methods for the conversion of cellulose to ethanol in strong acidic conditions or using cellulase. A limitation of the enzymatic process is the toxicity of the enzyme and in acidic conditions a limitation is the fact that the acid it recovered with difficulty. The paper towels as raw material present the advantage that the lignin was already eliminated in basic conditions. This project described the attempt to extract the glucose from paper using a mechanical approach and the addition of chemical compounds able to break the hydrogen bonds. The ethanol is then prepared by the anaerobic fermentation of glucose using Saccharomyces cerevisiae.