Dow Corning to Open Recycled Fiber Lab

Development capabilities of the RCF Lab are enabled with laboratory-scale equipment that emulates production processes. “The pulping machine creates pulp slurry from recyclable materials and is then transferred to a 30-liter deinking flotation cell. Here the ink is detached from the fiber surface and, along with filler materials and other contaminants, is collected. The effect is that the ‘brightness’ of the paper is increased, and the cleaned fibers are separated from the reject stream,” Francis said. “Finally, with our paper former, we can create paper samples in sheet form to study properties such as brightness using the lab’s spectrophotometer,” he added.