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Recycling of paper and board from mixed waste collections: Potential, technical feasibility and future challenges

Paper recycling offers environmental and economic advantages compared to primary paper production. However, a relevant quantity of the produced paper and board in Germany is currently discarded in mixed waste collections such as lightweight packaging, residual and commercial waste.

These papers and boards are often not material recycled. Therefore, the EnEWA research project developed a recycling process for paper and board from mixed waste collections. This article provides an overview of the results obtained during the three-year research project. Besides material characterizations to assess the paper and board resource potential in mixed waste collections, trials on sortability, defibration, and hygienization were conducted. The technical feasibility of recycling paper and board from lightweight packaging waste (LWP) was demonstrated during two production trials. An adaption of the XXXVI. Recommendation of the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment is aimed to enable the usage of paper and board from mixed waste collection for food packaging. The developed recycling process is planned to be industrially implemented for paper and board from LWP and selectively collected commercial waste.