Governments are demanding that during the recycling of printed products there must be a higher level of deinking.
The EU’s policy on the circular economy centres around recycling aiming to reduce waste and “conserve resources, combat climate change and protect the environment”, reported Ink World Magazine, but this could be really challenging for printers and ink manufacturers. Paper is the most recycled material at 70 percent, with at least “90 percent of newspapers in Europe are printed on recycled paper”, and according to the European Recovered Paper Council (ERPC), 90 percent of “corrugated boxes are made of recycled fibre and over half of fibres used in newspaper and board are sourced from recovered paper”.
The problem is that other users of paper want more access to the recycled product, but that the quality is not high enough in sufficient quantities, and this “increases the pressure on the paper and print industry to improve the efficiency of the deinking process”, added to which “brand owners and retail chains and their print suppliers are demanding evidence of uncontaminated paper recyclate”.
This has resulted in the European ecolabel structures such as EU Ecolabel, and Germany’s Blue Angel, demanding that “recycled print products” are subject to “to a high level of deinking before they will be certified”, and government departments are asking for print suppliers to have ecolabel certification. Companies are “preparing for a tightening of the rules” as ecolabelling could even extend to books.
Axel Fisher, Public Relations Manager at the International Association of the Deinking Industry (INGEDE), Munich, said: “Already one school books publisher in Germany has decided to opt for improved deinking of the recycled paper it uses in school text books because it is anticipating the German education ministry could soon demand ecolabelling of school text books.”
The French agency EcoFolio is encouraging paper recycling by offering “financial incentives” to increase the volume and the rate of deinking. The blame for the lack of quality of recycled paper is said to be due to paper mills not adopting new “deinking technologies”, said the printing sector and ink suppliers, but the mills say that the ink producers should be doing more to “adapt their inks to deinking processes”.
Problem inks include some types “of waterborne inks and flexo, UV and digital inks and in particular inkjet inks and some liquid toners”, and it is claimed that the difficulties in “eliminating these inks” is because of the “one system of paper recycling” which is based on alkaline floatation. ISO, a standard setting organisation, appears to “want to give paper users more choice of technologies” and is focusing on deinking and drawing up standards “similar to those applied to the quality control of raw materials”.
This means that deinking processes “have to be appropriate for dealing with characteristics of the ink in the printed products, not the other way around”, an approach consistent with the EU’s Waste Framework Directive which “underpins the Union’s policy on recycling and stipulates that priority should be given to the recycled product rather than the recycling process”.
The article concluded that in the end, the cost will be what directs the issues, which is why there is a “domination of the alkaline floatation process in Europe”.