I remember being a kid and sitting in class learning about all the important things in life. You know, DARE, Smokey the Bear, etc. I remember learning about recycling and its impact on the environment, but I don’t remember any animated characters accompanying it. Although my recollections are a bit vague about what we were taught, I still know that recycling is important and plays an important role in the health of our environment.
The father of a good friend of mine was an engineer at a local landfill, so on one of our field trips we visited his place of work. I remember the tour, seeing the huge machinery sifting through the municipal solid waste materials and being grossed out by the smell of it all. During our visit, the importance of disposing of recyclable materials such as paper, plastic, glass, etc. was highlighted. properly so they don’t end up in a landfill.
Fortunately for us, many years ago someone developed a process to recycle certain materials so they don’t get buried in the ground leaving a horrible smell to anyone within surprisingly close sniffing distance. For the sake of this post, I will focus on the 10 step process of how paper is recycled and in a later post I will discuss the recycling process for other recyclable materials.
Please refer to the steps below for the waste paper recycling process:
Step 1: Sorting Paper Waste – Disposal of all paper that has contaminants such as food, plastic, metal, and other debris can be done by hand. Many companies will easily classify their paper with tools like those created by MSS, Inc..
Step 2: Collection and transportation: Your paper waste can be taken to a local recycling center, a recycling container or a recycling center can pick it up.
Step 3: Paper Storage: Paper mills store paper until it is needed in the next stage of the process. This paper is then transferred onto large conveyors for the next step.
Step 4: Re-pulping and screening: The pulper then cuts the recovered paper into small pieces while heating the mixture to break it down into fibers. The fibers are then filtered to ensure there are no more contaminants.
Step 5 – Paper Cleaning – To further clean the paper debris, a process called a spinner is carried out. This process will remove increasingly difficult objects to remove.
Step 6: Ink Removal – Allows you to remove inks and other sticky materials from the paper using water and air bubbles.
Step 7: Refining, Bleaching, and Bleaching – Recycled fibers are separated into individual fibers so they can be further prepared. If the fibers contain any color, the dyes will be removed and if the recycled paper is going to be white, it will be bleached with hydrogen peroxide.
Step 8: Papermaking – The pulp is finally mixed with water and chemicals until it is placed on a screen that drains the water from the pulp. Once the pulp is drained, it is wrapped in a sheet and passed through heated metal rollers that dry the paper.
So the next time you plan on just throwing away that paper instead of recycling it, think about this process and the unpleasant odor people are forced to smell when someone chooses not to recycle waste paper.