Development of Paper Using Coir Fibers as a Packaging Product

This project was developed to investigate the potential of coir fibres to be used as secondary raw material in order to promote environmentally friendly packaging. In addition, old newspapers were embedded in the specimen to hold the coir fibres each other. The main objective was to determine mechanical properties of paper with different beating times and percentages of coir fibres. The responses of this research are tensile index and tear factor. Mechanical pulping process was chosen to produce the pulps in random orientation with cross-machine direction. Regression and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was employed to determine significant differences between percentages of fibres used and beating time for each response variables. The results show that as beating time increased, the mechanical properties of papers increased. Otherwise, the increment of fibres percentages has caused the mechanical paper properties decreased. The combination of 25% fibres and 75% newspaper with 20 min of beating time has produced the best mechanical properties. The conclusion suggests that coir fibres can be one of the alternative raw materials which can be applied for packaging product.