Determination of Toner Content by Diffuse Reflectance for Office Paper Recycling Studies

Waste office paper, photocopied or laser printed, has recently increased along with office automatization. In waste office paper, toner ink is used as the printing medium in place of conventional oil ink. Since toner ink cannot be saponificated by alkali and be decolored by bleaching, different from the case of oil ink, toner remains on regenerated paper as black specks. Although cascade recycling of waste office paper is compelled at present, the demand for low-grade paper is limited. From such circumstances, a new separation process for waste office paper is demanded to achieve parallel recycling. At the first stage of separation studies, the sharpness of separation is evaluated using small separators to obtain fundamental data. In a lab-scale separator, the sample amount of one feed is generally a few grams. However, the sample amount used for brightness, ERIC, and image analysis that are generally used to evaluate the efficiency of deinking are not small for lab-scale tests of these analyses. This paper describes an investigation of a sheet preparation method by a small amount of sample under 0.5g and compares the precision of toner content determination of spectroscopic analysis and image analysis from the viewpoint of separation evaluation. The easiness and convenience of the operation using only general-purpose equipments has also been set as a principle purpose. From the viewpoint of an analysis that yields high precision with a small amount of sample in short time, the method calculating the absorption coefficient from diffuse reflectance in the visible region is the most rational method in this study.