Environmentally Safe Bleaching of Post Consumer Waste Papers, 1990 Pulping Conference Proceedings

Current technology to bleach secondary fiber has been mainly limited to chlorine based bleaches. Two developing trends will require major changes to this traditional strategy. Increased use of post consumer waste and the nationwide shift to use more environmentally safe bleaching is rapidly becoming a reality. To enable the growth of the recycle paper segment, new environmentally safe bleaching sequences for secondary fiber must be developed.

This paper surveys several existing secondary fiber bleaching sequences in the tissue segment and compares them to new more environmentally safe bleaching sequences that are being developed. One such sequence uses all oxidative bleaching with oxygen, ozone, and peroxide. Mill and laboratory data is provided evaluating their ability to handle the expected changes in recycle furnishes. Potential for achieving brightness is described and future work to take advantage of these findings is noted.