Jan 11, 2021

Objectives:

To prepare a paper with the help of water hyacinth.

Water hyacinth is cellulose-rich, grow rapidly in ponds, soft and easy to process and thus potentially can be an alternative source of material for paper making. Besides, processing water hyacinth into paper requires much less energy and produces less chemical waste as compared with processing wood chips.

Jan 11, 2021

STEPS TO MAKING WATER HYACINTH PAPER

  1. Harvest hyacinth plants, chop off roots and leaves.
  2. Cook chopped hyacinth on low flame.
  3. Sieve cooked chopped hyacinth into bowl.
  4. Pour into a blender with recycled paper that has been mashed into pulp.
  5. Pour out mixed hyacinth and recycled paper concentrate on a cloth of water to cool.
  6. Remove unwanted coarse material from the concentrate.
  7. Arrange pulp on screen rectangular wooden frames and dry for about five to six hours.
  8. Flatten the Hyacinth paper if desired, the paper is ready to be made into postcards, paper products.

We have started working on water hyacinth papermaking in the month of January 2021 with Vaishali Gavandi ma’am. In the starting, We have learned the process of papermaking which she is doing. Along with that from literature we got to know that water hyacinth contains 95% water in it. The remaining 5% has 30-50% cellulose and 15-30% lignin, which we can use for papermaking. From this information we started working on the papermaking from water hyacinth, there we performed three trials, they are as follows :


Jan11, 2021

  1. In the first trial we had taken 500gm water hyacinth on a wet basis, after that we cooked the water hyacinth and crushed it in the grinder and after getting pulp, performed the papermaking process, from which we got fibres of water hyacinth and the paper was not bound, because of no binding material in the process, so this trial failed. 

Jan 14, 2021

2. In this trial we had taken 700gm of water hyacinth and added 20% waste paper of the wet weight of the water hyacinth which was 140gm and performed the above same process of papermaking. From this process we got rough paper which curled after drying. The weight was similar to the waste paper added in this process of 140gm.

Jan 21, 2021

3.We had used 1000gm water hyacinth in the third trial and added 20% waste paper  of dry weight of water hyacinth which was 20gm. After this process we got papers which were having more water hyacinth content than the total weight of waste paper added. The total weight of papers we got from this trial was 46gm.

March 4, 2021

Along with papermaking trials we have compared the economics of water hyacinth paper with the papermaking of bamboo.

From this comparison we found that to get 100Kg of cellulose from water hyacinth we need 1600Rs, and on the other hand for getting the same amount of cellulose from bamboo we need 899Rs. Which clearly shows that paper making from water hyacinth is more costly than bamboo papermaking, So because of this economics we have concluded that the water hyacinth paper making process is not financially viable.