The utilization of wastepaper as a papermaking raw material is everlastingly required for the environmental protection of earth. However the recycling of wastepaper for this purpose cause another problem such as the increasing of the load of wastewater treatment, lower strength properties of paper, and poor printability, etc. The interest in the development of the environmentally friendly deinking technology is increased continuously. Thus, our research team have tried to apply the ozone to the deinking of white ledger and ONP, and obtained the positive results which can be considered as an alternative method for the conventional deinking method. The purpose of this study is to investigate the mechanism of ozone deinking. Styrene acrylate and polystyrene were treated with ozone and measured the change of molecular weight with the GPC. The molecular weight distribution obtained with GPC showed only slight increase by the ozone treatment, and gel formation by the polymerization was observed. Therefore the removal of ink particles with ozone treatment seems to be facilitated by the increase of the brittleness and decrease of adhesive property.
