Recycled Pulp Fibers
- The paper industry of the XXIst rely on low-cost market pulps and chemical additives for running huge paper machines, up to ten meters wide and up to 2.000 m/min speeds, achieving unprecedent high production volumes at minimal production costs.
- During the twilight of the 20th century, the great consumption of paper thanks to a booming economy and the constant need for both economic and environmental improvements in paper production drove the development of advanced techniques for pulp fibers recycling.
- Nowadays recycled paper is the main source of fibers used to manufacture paper and cardboard, currently providing 55% of fibers for cardboard and paper production.
- But recycled paper, which enters the factory as bales, is subject to constant and unpredictable changes in the type & quality of the fibers and of their contaminants; therefore, maintaining paper production within quality and cost specifications requires constant control of incoming recycled materials, the only way to ensure the sustainability of the company.
Products for this application : MORFI NEO, Simpatic and Simpalab
- MorFi proved to be the perfect tool for quick, accurate and objective assessment of pulp fiber quality, being an unequable testing solution for several key areas of paper recycling:
- quality control of incoming bales of waste paper, allowing users to determine quickly and accurately the types of fibers present and assess its condition in terms of key fiber characteristics such as fiber length, fibrillation and fines content.
- research into development of recycling techniques to reduce the inevitable regular decrease in recycled fiber quality throughout its lifetime due to its accumulative degradation every time it gets recycled again, impacting negatively fiber integrity & strength, compromising resistance of papers
- Simpatic assesses in-line the presence of contaminants in pulp while still humid, being an unequable testing solution for surveying the efficiency of several key machinery used for the paper recycling such as dispergers, screens and cleaners.
- Simpalab is a solution for automated dirt count in paper, using digital image analysis, providing quickly reliable test results – accurate, repetitive and reproducible, replacing efficiently visual evaluation, which regardless technical standards created for this matter, like ISO 5350, TAPPI T213 and T437, relied on skilled staff, provided limited data and suffered from low repeatability and reproducibility due to its inherent subjectivity.
In Summary
Recycled fibers became fundamental in the paper industries in the XXIst century, thanks to its cost and sustainability, but its unpredictable variability in terms of fiber quality and contaminants requires the use of high technology for providing quickly and accurately a common analytical language between R&D, Quality Control, and Process teams — enabling dynamic integration in the development, understanding and optimization of fibrous materials.