Recycling
Old corrugated containers are an excellent source of fibre for recycling. They can be compressed and baled for cost effective transport. The baled boxes are put in a hydropulper, which is a large vat of warm water for cleaning and processing. The pulp slurry is then used to make new paper and fiber products.
Mill and corrugator scrap, or broke, is the cleanest source for recycling. The high rates of post-consumer recycling reflect the efficiency of recycling mills to clean and process the incoming materials. Several technologies are available to sort, screen, filter, and chemically treat the recycled paper.
Many extraneous materials are readily removed. Twine, strapping, etc. are removed from the hydropulper by a "ragger". Metal straps and staples can be screened out or removed by a magnet. Film-backed pressure sensitive tape stays intact: the PSA adhesive and the backing are both removed together.
Materials which are more difficult to remove include wax coatings on corrugated boxes and "stickies", soft rubbery particles which can clog the paper maker and contaminate the recycled paper. Stickies can originate from book bindings, hot melt adhesives, pressure-sensitive adhesives from paper labels, laminating adhesives of reinforced gummed tapes, etc.
Corrugated fiberboard shredders are now available which convert post-consumer corrugated board into packing/cushioning materials by means of a specialized shredding process.
Recycling corrugated fiberboard helps countries without sustainable wood resources build a paper and packaging industry locally.
Read more about this topic: Corrugated Fiberboard
Famous quotes containing the word recycling:
“Both the Moral Majority, who are recycling medieval language to explain AIDS, and those ultra-leftists who attribute AIDS to some sort of conspiracy, have a clearly political analysis of the epidemic. But even if one attributes its cause to a microorganism rather than the wrath of God, or the workings of the CIA, it is clear that the way in which AIDS has been perceived, conceptualized, imagined, researched and financed makes this the most political of diseases.”
—Dennis Altman (b. 1943)