Entrepreneurs succeed in transforming used PET into mineral paper

via Investigación y Desarrollo

In order to cut down fewer trees and avoid wasting water, a group of young Mexicans designed a system that converts used PET bottles into mineral paper or peta paper, which is biodegradable and meets quality standards required to print books, boxes general stationery.

“We manufacture ecological paper created with recycled plastic bottles, calcium carbonate and stone. We don’t use water or chemicals, such as chlorine. The mineral paper is stronger than the standard, you can not break it with your hands, is waterproof, has the quality of being photodegradable and only absorbs the necessary amount of ink when printing,” said Ever Adrian Nava, cofounder of the “Cronology” company, located in Ecatepec, a municipality in Mexico State, just north from Mexico City.

Powered by “Cronology” technology, making one ton of paper saves up to 20 trees and 56,000 liters of water. Besides, its production process is 15 percent cheaper because it requires no chemicals like chlorine. Another benefit of this system is that with 235 kilograms of pellets (beads of PET) a ton of mineral paper is made, also in just eight hours 24,000 kilograms of plastic can be obtained.

Before converting the PET into paper, it is necessary to first convert the recycled plastic bottles into pellets (plastic beads) by crushing them with various pieces of calcium carbon, to create a mixture which is subjected to a casting process with over a hundred degrees Celsius, to form sheets of large paper that are rolled and form sheets.

The original idea of this type of paper is to reduce production costs and avoid deforestation, since the country currently produces 700,000 tons of paper per year to meet the needs of the local market which translates in 10, 000, 300 million dollars.

About 33 percent of paper produced in Mexico is for books and notebooks, 25 percent for wrapping, and the rest for toilet paper and wrapped foods, the product of the Mexican company intends to replace them.

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