Recycled Paper

Old paper is a raw material that in the last 40 years has been deserving an increasing interest in the paper industry. This interest is due not only to environmental reasons but also to economic and technological reasons.

Paper is made of wood. This is mainly composed of lignin and cellulose and it is from the latter that the pulp is made, which will give rise to the paper. The paper industry, with some difficulties, has however developed an advanced technology that allows to recover the paper discarded by the consumer after use. To do this, selectively collect it and classify it by type so that it can be recycled to serve various uses.

Paper recycling is achieved by harnessing the cellulose fibers in the papers used to produce new papers. The operations of disaggregating and separating the recovered fibers from the used papers are simpler processes than those used to extract fibers from the wood. After use the old papers are introduced into the process, allowing the reduction of the amount of pulp necessary for the production of new paper (one ton of recycled paper allows to save 2 to 3 m3 of wood).

The fibers can only be recycled 3 to 5 times, so obtaining recycled paper sometimes involves adding some amount of virgin paper pulp to replace degraded fibers.