Team:UESTC-China/Description
What inspired us？
Once, when one of our team members was printing some paper, she typed the wrong words for several times. At that moment, she found that she did not know where to put the wasted paper. She looked at the printer, and thought: " What
if I could put the wasted paper in a machine and turn it back into brand new paper? "
So that was when our story with Deinker began...
Why do we focus on office paper recycling？
After our survey and research, we know that we are facing a major environmental protection problem, and the source of it is the unpretentious paper.
Practical Significance
Wasted paper is one of the important renewable resources. After recycling, wasted paper enters into paper mills, and then is produced into paper pulp.
However, office wasted paper is a thorny problem that cannot be solved. And the cause of this is in recycling system. Today, the average global recycling rate for printed writing paper is just 8%, meaning that the vast majority
of office wasted paper has not entered into the paper cycle process. This fact was confirmed in our field survey and interview. The person in charge of the wasted paper recycling station told us that office wasted paper is often not recycled because it is scattered, low priced, and easily polluted.
Figure1. UESTC-China team members in the wasted paper recycling station.
Apart from the low recycling rate, another problem is the difficulty of sorting wasted paper. As only trash owning high value would be sorted and recycled, nationwide implementation of other kinds of trash sorting still has a long way
to go. During the recycling process, paper is mixed with other garbage, causing a dip in the quality of paper fibers.
Figure2. Waste paper mixed with another garbage
After our literature and social research, we confirmed that office wasted paper recycling has an important practical environmental significance, which gives us the motivation to execute it. By now, we have the clues that the key to reuse
office wasted paper is to raise the recycling rate and avoid paper quality loss in recycling process.
One of the best ways to promote office paper recycling is to skip recycling facilities. Recycling paper directly just at sites where people need it, such as schools, office building, institutions and government departments.(Click herefor
more information about daily paper consuming quantity). So we decided to further check the market feedback for Deinker —— an office-hold machine for paper in-situ regeneration.
Market Demand
Are users willing to take actions to recycle paper by themselves and pay for the machine?
With the questionnaire survey, we found that office workers have a natural demand for paper reuse. About 58% respondents said reuse is their main desire to treat paper among all wasted paper disposal methods. This means that more than
half of the population support paper reuse.
In addition, demand surveys show that market demand is not low. We use STP theory to segment the market and find the target users and their use intentions. The results of the survey showed that 4.32% of the population would not consider
using Deinker for wasted paper disposal, while 95.68% of the population is willing to use Deinker to varying degrees. Also, 55% of them are willing to use Deinker to treat 60-100% of their daily wasted paper disposal. The survey data
are shown as the following figure.
Figure3. Data statistics of the willingness to use Deinker
If you want to know more about our marketing research, please click here.
How can we realize in-situ regeneration of OWP?
To realize in situ regeneration of wasted paper, we combine synthetic biology with hardware design. The synthetic biology gives us a tool to create an efficient deinking enzyme system. And hardware help deink automatically and help to
really bring the concept of in situ generation into human life.
Biodeink system
The technology of traditional paper regeneration is chemical deinking. Chemical deinking requires a large number of chemicals and leads to severe pollution. However, this approach is not suitable for safe use in office scenarios.
Different from chemicals, enzyme has the properties of low pollution, low energy consumption and high efficiency, which is more in line with the concept of in-situ regeneration.
Therefore, at the beginning of the design, we focused on creating a green, efficient and stable deinking enzyme system which can be used in office.
Hardware
The enzyme solution made by synthetic biology can achieve the effect of deinking. However, it still needs human operation. At the same time, it has various environmental requirements that will influence the final result of deinking, so it cann't be directly
applied in people's life. To solve this problem, design an automatic deinking device became the next target of our project. We conducted a questionnaire survey among offices and students in order to determine the specific indicators
of our device, and found that the miniaturization of paper deinking device is the most ideal deinking state. Therefore, we designed and built a paper automatic deinking hardware that can be placed on the table. （Click
here for more details)
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