ANALYSIS OF PRINTING PROPERTIES ON AGRICULTURAL WASTE BASED PAPER

Sustainability is not a Choice, rather it’s a necessity! It’s a better and more eco- friendly way of living. Everyday efforts are made in every field to make the process more efficient and sustainable. And in the world full of Printing and Packaging, Paper plays a vital role in the social, economic, and environmental development of any country. The printing industry is the largest collective consumer of paper products and estimated that around 43 trillion papers are used for printing annually across the country. As the printing industry continues to reduce the cost and improve the quality of paper, the effective measurement of printing quality is very important. Over the past two centuries, wood has been the primary raw material in paper manufacturing. However, wood-based paper carries a significant “ecological shadow” of energy consumption, bleaching chemicals, and water used in its production. Aware of these sustainability issues, the paper manufacturers are making efforts to explore alternative fibers to provide paper choices for consumers. One of biggest step towards the sustainable goal by the printing industry is introduction of sustainable paper/substrate. This new generation of paper is being produced from Agricultural Waste and other tree free alternatives.

So the question arises here is what is Agricultural Waste Paper and how it could be the next big thing? Agricultural residues are left over materials from the harvesting of agricultural crops such as wheat, rice, cotton, flax, rye and sugarcane bagasse. These fibers, typically treated as a waste product, are considered the most preferable materials to be used for paper production because it makes the most of a waste material and doesn’t require dedicated agricultural land. Only about

8 % of global paper and board production is based on agricultural wastes, 92 % of world production depends upon wood whether softwood or hardwood. Cotton linters, Rice straw, Wheat straw, Sugarcane bagasse, Corn stalks, hemp, jute, tomato stem are some of the other examples of this raw product for this kind of paper. Looking forward with this trend Sugarcane Bagasse is the major player here. Sugarcane Bagasse is the fibrous mass or residues left after the crushing and extraction of sugar from sugar cane. There are many Companies and Start-ups on national and international level which manufactures office copy papers and other types of paper made up from the sugarcane bagasse. Agricultural Waste can be great Substitute to the existing wood paper, it has all the necessary properties required for the paper making and even high quality paper can be achieved with the addition of some additives and chemicals.

Well we learnt that new developments has taken place in the paper industry with agricultural waste based paper. Now the questions arises here are how well this paper works on the printing machine, how well is the printability on this kind of paper , where it stands when compared with the commercially available paper, what problems it faces and their solutions and many such questions. Well there is no need worry, in next following lines we will be answering all these questions! Before moving forward let’s see what are the different factors that affects the Printability. Printability is the effect of the reproduction of the images sharply and correctly without the displacement of ink on the paper. Printability is the interacting result of different paper-related factors in printing process, which contribute to the full use of the quality potential of the paper in the print process .Parameters for printability are mainly their properties that influence the visual quality of a printed product. The two main types of property that affects the print quality are Optical Properties (Brightness, opacity, gloss, color) and Surface Properties (Smoothness, porosity, and sizing).

To learn more about this paper with respect to printability many experiments took place.. We learnt that this kind of paper gave a hard competition to the existing paper made from trees and can be commercially used as print paper with addition of some enhancers and treatment. When the bagasse sheets were compared with the hardwood and softwood sheets w.r.t. to ink-transfer, print density, print through and printing smoothness it showed intermediate values, which represents the potential of Bagasse paper as the future of paper industry and this potential can tapped by more research and developments in this area. When the sheets were tested for optical density, printing unevenness and print gloss, as well as surface roughness and surface resistivity using digital electrophotography printing we found that this types of papers are suitable for achieving excellent electrographic digital printing quality in uncoated paper segments. Now let’s talk about Color, we all know that its one of the most important factor and decides the fate of paper. Let’s see how the our agricultural waste based paper specifically bagasse sheets performs in the Color test. The color reproduction capability and process capability of bagasse sheets were evaluated in terms of optical density, print contrast, and color gamut. We found that the average optical density and print Contrast is very much near values of the hardwood sheet. Even the Color gamut of both sheets were similar, which represents that color can reproduced on the bagasse sheets.

The Bagasse sheets faces the porosity problem. This can be solved by the use of fillers of high surface area, will fill the inter fiber space and improves the porosity of paper. Also Calcium carbonate gives a profound increase in porosity particularly bagasse paper. We see that the agricultural waste based paper particularly Bagasse sheets passed all the tests.

So what we all can conclude from these tests, one thing for sure that through various experimentations under different conditions we can conclude that the agricultural waste based paper is suitable for printing. By maintaining the above pre and post paper making process, we can get good quality of printing. Though risk and cost remain main criteria in decision making process, when these factors are balanced in a long term through ambience. This kind of paper can become a substitute for the commercial paper made up from trees. With this kind of paper Environment can be saved by reducing the cut down of trees and even the waste management of agricultural waste can be done in the right and more sustainable direction. The Agricultural waste paper can be one of the step towards the Sustainable Development, it not only gives a substitute to existing paper also gives a way to utilize the waste management and also can be a part of circular economy.

AKSHAY INGLE

TE PRINTING

PVG COET & GKWIM

REFERENCES

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