GREEN RECYCLING OF TONER PRINTED PAPERS BY ENZYME DEINKING

The basic printing material of the printing industry is paper. The paper industry uses trees as a source of raw materials. Due to the increasing need and the environmental effects of tree cutting, recycling of used papers, deinking and making papers reusable are among the popular study subjects. The chemicals used in traditional deinking processes are highly toxic. For this reason, environmental protection, which is one of the main reasons for recycling, cannot be adequately achieved with this method. In studies carried out for this purpose, environmentally friendly enzymatic ink removal methods can be used. The enzymatic deinking process is preferred because it has advantages such as high efficiency, low environmental impact, less harmful chemicals needed to achieve equal gloss, better strength, as well as a lower carbon footprint. One of the printing areas where paper is used most in daily life is the products printed with personal printing machines. In this study, it is aimed to print it with a desktop digital printing machine and deink it with amylase enzyme. In this sense, prints were made on 80g/m2 UPM office papers with black toner. Unprinted papers and printed papers were first chemically deinked according to the Ingede 11 method. Then, treatment with enzyme was added to the system as a secondary cleaning method. The amount of amylase enzyme used is 150 FPU/100 g paper. After the deinking process, filter papers were produced. The surface properties, color, brightness, amount of contamination and amount of recycled ink of the produced papers were determined. Papers with only chemical deinking and those with additional enzymatic treatment were compared. As a result, it was concluded that cleaner papers were obtained with additional treatment with enzyme.