An Environmental Friendly Recycling of Waste Toner Cartridges in Republic of Croatia

The large amount of waste toner cartridges has been generated as a consequence of it’s use in printers and duplicators on the everyday basis. Waste toner cartridge contains heavy metals, plastics as well as toxic residual toner and has been characterized as hazardous waste. Therefore the management of the waste toner presents significant issue in the environmental protection. The use of the hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment as well as promoting the collection, recycling and recovery targets for all types of electrical goods was prescribed by EU legislation, particularly Directive 2009/95/EC (WEEE Directive) and together with the Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive 2002/95/EC (RoHS) has been in force since February 2003. At the moment, Republic of Croatia is in the process of becoming a full EU member so it has been obliged to implement EU legislation as well. Concerning the management of electrical and electronic equipment in Croatia according to WEEE Directive, the system has been established for the last five years but there was no practical possibility for the treatment of the collected waste toner in the country. In this work, the study of the possibility of waste toner and further recycling and reuse has been performed with the special emphasis on the reuse of the residual toner. In order to decrease explosive properties of the residual toner, the material was mixed with the calcite. After performed analyses of the mixture it was found that the mixture can not be disposed to the landfill as inert waste material since the value of the total organic carbon content (TOC) has found to be above the limit prescribed by the law. All other analyzed parameters have found to be below the limits prescribed by the law. Moreover, it was found that the mixture of residual toner which contains 10% of calcite is an excellent bitumen additive since it improved bitumen’s application properties. So, the mixture of the residual toner and calcite can be used as valuable raw material in bitumen production and used in different construction works.