With rising environmental awareness, paper recycling becomes a more and more important issue also in marketing of printers and – accordingly – in the development of a printer. But very little is known about coherences. During the recycling process, the ink is separated from the paper fibers dissolved in water, and then it has to be removed from the aqueous suspension. This is why current inkjet inks are almost impossible to deink. There are some ideas how they might be improved in terms of recyclability. One idea is to find a curing step that forms a macroscopic ink film that can break in to pieces big enough to be removed.Dry toners easily fit into the deinking process that has been designed for offset and gravure inks. Still there are differences in fragmentation of the ink film, leading to different speck counts which are the critical parameter for toner based inks. The fragmentation is thought to depend on the homogeneity and the viscosity of the ink film. The morphology of the ink film might also be influenced by the surface properties of the paper used.
Axel Fischer, "Investigations of Deinkability and Ink-Paper Interactions" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies and Digital Fabrication (NIP24), 2008, pp 558 - 561, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2008.24.1.art00027_2