Waste Paper collection Activity in the main Campus
Post consumer paper or waste paper is an important renewable raw material for the paper industry. The trend of using wood pulp for paper making is slowly decreasing with the increasing awareness for environmental protection. In paper mills approximately 35-40 per cent of the raw material for paper making is waste paper that is many times imported. It has been observed that lot of paper waste is accumulated in the university which include office paper or the writing paper, old records, examination papers, print and misprint sheets, periodicals and old library junks.
With an aim to initiate waste paper recycling in the campus, the waste paper collection activity was started, with a prior communication to all the Offices and Departments from 26.10.2020. The stockpiled paper in various departments ranged between 80-100 kgs per month and the total paper collected in a span of 10 months is 1.1 tons.
The paper waste loses its strength on storage and hence it was decided to process the same on job contract basis. Mr. Subramanya, Proprietor, Kirti Papers, Tarihal, Hubballi came forward to process the waste paper. Initial processing of 100 kg waste paper was done during January 2020. Paper lay ability for evenness and thickness for specific end use is very important in hand made paper making process. Therefore, waste paper pulp was blended with waste hosiery pulp in the ratio 50:50. The lay ability of the blend into paper of different GSMs was experimented and papers of 100, 200 and 440 GSM were prepared.
Product development adds face value to the intermediate product. The paper bags: 200 GSM, Files: 440 GSM, Envelops: 200 GSM and A4 sheets: 100 GSM were designed. The activity has now taken a research mode, encouraging experiments on the blend proportions, quality evaluation of the paper and products.
The team is now looking forward to have a standard product development protocol that can earn revenue to the institution.