Towards Truly Repulpable Wet-strengthened Papers

This paper summarizes our recent activities directed towards the development of fully recyclable, high wet strength papers. Our idea was to introduce labile covalent disulfide linkages to wet strength polymer that could be cleaved by a reducing agent. The specific goals were to determine the best locations for the labile linkages in a fiber/fiber joint. Virtually all polymeric linkages in the fiber/fiber joints must include a labile linkage for …