Deinking and Recycling HP Digital Inks: From Lab Scale to Pilot Scale, 2010 TAPPI PEERS Conference

Please Note: This document will be available in PDF format in the "My Electronic Documents" link on the home page once your order has been completed. Please make sure you have the latest version of Acrobat Reader. Click on the Acrobat Reader icon to check for the latest version, it’s FREE. To print a hardcopy of a PDF file correctly you must have a postscript printer. If you are not sure if your printer is a postscript printer please refer to your owner’s manual.

Efficient recycling of paper products is important for fulfilling both environmental sustainability and economical returns. With increasing market share of digital printing technologies, the amount of digital prints in waste-paper stream is expected to increase in the coming years. It is imperative that digital inks be deinkable in industrial recycling mills. Here we show that high-quality deinked pulps can be obtained from various HP digital print products at lab scale via our environmentally benign near-neutral deinking chemistry (herein referred to as HPES) while using two key processes – pulping and flotation. We show that excellent results are achieved based on the five key parameters of the ERPC deinking scorecard. We next discuss the successful transformation and adaptation of HPES from lab scale to pilot scale. Optimization of HPES is further assisted by advanced molecular modeling and dynamics simulation. Using HP-Indigo print media in mixed-office waste (MOW) as the study subject, we demonstrate that excellent recyclability can be achieved at pilot scale, performed in a fashion that closely depicts a standard production operation. High final optical brightness, low dirt count, ERIC value, and ash content of the recovered pulps were obtained. Promising statistical data of these key indicators suggest a deinked pulp quality closely matches that would achieve regularly in a commercial recycling mill. It is noteworthy to point out that good recyclability of HP-Indigo printed media can be accomplished with relatively high ink coverage.