Starting off with the first in the series, and probably the more unique and interesting: I worked in a toner manufacturing facility. I started out in the production department, where toner is actually created, and then worked in the warehouse, where it’s stored and moved to packaging, loaded in trailers and shipped out around the world.
Maufacturing
Starting this position, I knew very little about toner. I knew it was a particle that could be electrically attracted to a drum inside a printer. I knew this information because of my college schooling for being a system administrator, and computer technician.
So, not knowing much, and learning how it was actually created was fascinating, because not many people know the process or what kind of expenses are put into creating this stuff. It’s outrageously expensive for a reason.
Raw Materials
It all starts with what actually IS toner on a material base. Well, it’s mostly just plastic resin and a few other ingredients that make it give the resin a positive charge. While, I can’t tell you the exactly materials used, or what quantities, I can say that there was a precise recipe that needed to be followed in order to ensure the materials didn’t interact with each other and mess up the consistency of the mixture.
Yes, we mixed all of these materials in giant batches. We used industrial mixers that could hold a decent bit of weight, and could mix at RPMs up to 900. We made toner in batches, making the process more repetitive, but also, if in the event of a mishap, the loss of money put into Raw Materials wasn’t as large.
After all of these materials were mixed in this specific order and everything was within specification, we then moved the materials in large bins known as totes in the industry. In order to move these materials from one step to the next, we used fork trucks (or reach trucks depending on who you talk to ), and pneumatic controlled tote tilts.
More Mixing
Currently, the material looks like pretty fine gravel, with many sparkly RMs (Raw Materials) showing through. We need to get this mixture to a more consistent, and finer particle. Those two things are done in two separate processes, first, let’s get this mixture more consistent. For this, we used giant kneaders. We would feed the material in, mixing it with the kneaders, while heating it up into a goopy paste, and extrude onto a press roller. The press roller would lay the material flat onto a conveyor belt, which was cooled so the material could be broken back into “gravel”. The cooling belt dropped the material into a series of hammer mills and screens, pulverizing the plastics until they could fall through a screen which lead to a pipe that would pneumatically convey the materials into a hopper.
The finer side of things
Getting this rough gravel like material into a fine powder is no easy task. This is where the machinery used get even more ridiculous. One of these grinders we use would costs between $750,000 and $1,500,000.
This isn’t a conventional grinder that you’re probably thinking of, this is an air mill grinder. It uses compressed air to pick up and smash this gravel plastic into each other, and take it away.
Once the material is small enough to be pulled up by a precise vacuum we keep within the grinder, the material would come to a spinning wheel with a bunch of slots in it. Depending on the speed of the wheel spinning and the size of the slots on the wheel, we could control the size of the powder going through the grinder and onto the next process.
You see, the wheel would “catch and fling” any larger pieces and they would fall back down to be ground again, and repeat this process until it was small enough to slide through the slots on the spinning wheel. There are specific sizes of powder that we would have to maintain.
But we’re not done with the step, yet. After being ground down to a powder, we had to go through a process called “classifying”, where we would remove the outliers of the first grinding step. The classifying process worked in a similar way, using a vacuum force to keep material moving, while spinning wheels separated what could stay of what material needed to get recycled/thrown away.
Two wheels aligned with each other would spin very quickly, but at a different rate of speed to allow either too large or too small particles to go and be recycled, while the material that did not get pushed through the slots on the two wheels would travel through another air conveyor, or tote, and be moved onto the next process.
Please note: I am leaving out a mammoth amount of information here for confidentiality purposes, as well as a small lack on knowledge of how these things actually worked. I am no engineer after all.
So, after both grinding and classifying the material, we had to keep a spec of particle diameter, as well as how much of the material in under a certain diameter. If the powder would be too fine, the final print out of the printer would get dirty, as the powder would stick to the drum over time. Same vice-versa.
What’s this? More mixing?
Oh, yeah. We have some more mixing to do. Here, the ground and classified material would be put into batches again, and more RMs would be added and mixed together. We have to add these RMs into the mixture for a few reasons:
- These RMs would interfere with the RMs added at the start of the process
- These RMs give the toner it’s final clean, shiny look on paper
- These RMs keep the powder from clumping together and making a mess inside the printer. Toner flows very similar to water, if you’ve ever held a cup of it.
Again, this process is done in batches to eliminate any whoopsies, contaminating the still viable toner, as well as not require ludicrous sized machinery, as what we are using was large enough as is.
We also put the RMs in in a certain order to avoid having the RMs interact with each other in an unintended way, just as we did in the beginning. This mixer, once completed with the batches, releases the toner into the totes to allow for the next, and final manufacturing process.
Screening
I’m not talking about any tests, although we do that too. Nah, what I’m talking about here is a really cool sifter of sorts. Material would come out of the tote, and into a table feeder, where it would then slowly be placed onto a screener, and fall through back into the finished product tote.
This screener vibrates very very fast. Fast enough that the first time I looked at these things, I was having a really hard time trying to read the labels on them as well as even identifying the actual shape of them. The screener’s screen within it also vibrated, using a transducer to make the metal screen dance.
We screen the toner to remove excess RMs that were done in the previous mixing process, as well as remove any foreign particles that could have been added into the toner mixture between kneading and screening. As it turns out, toner production can cause a lot of metal to corrode or break apart in some of these processes.
We would test the product in this stage three times: at start, middle, and end of a tote. Verifying that all material though the process was within spec. After all of these processes, you have toner. This toner has yet to be put into the plastic cartridge that gets boxed and shipped to retailers.
Lets talk about some issues
If you have any knowledge of working with grains, sugars, powders, or basically any milled product, you will know one of the largest, and most scary things that a toner manufacturer faces: dust explosions.
Keeping everything clean is huge priority in both safety, and non-contamination. We moved toner using totes, which have gaskets and some small protections for keeping the dust from escaping.
The biggest hurdle of making sure we never had any dust explosions was keeping everything grounded, This was crucial. All bins, totes, conveyors, augers, any all machinery was to be grounded at all times. Even the containers that collected the run-off from the screener were grounded, simply because there was still dust from it.
Now, working in a factory such as this, accidents do happen. Sometimes a tote leaked, and you’d have a toner streak along the floor. We’d vacuum it up and use a floor scrubber to get any of the excess that we missed with the vacuum.
Other times, a larger issue would occur. Say someone forgot to close a port on a mixer, or forgot properly place a tote under a piece of machinery. This would mean there would be a large amount of toner floating around in the air, dusting every surface imaginable, as well just hanging in the air for a long time. This would happen from time to time.
Procedure when something such of that would occur was to:
- If you aren’t wearing one already (it wasn’t mandatory except for certain steps) put your respirator on.
- Notify anyone in the area a spill has occurred
- Leave the area
- Segregate the area from any spreading (there were large doors we could close to keep toner contained to one room)
- Wait for dust to settle (this could take up to 30 minutes depending on severity of the spill)
- Clean using the proper methods. (I.E. Vacuums, Mops, Scrubbers.)
Toner manufacturing is an incredible process, and I am happy to have been a part of figuring out how it all works. Of course, this is the mechanical way to product toner. There are also ways to do the same thing using chemicals, and large bathes, but that was not the process of this plant.
Why so $$$$?
Why is toner expensive? If case you haven’t been paying attention, this is a lot of machinery that I’ve been talking about: Kneaders, press rollers, conveyors, hammermills, baghouses, grinders, classifiers, blows, augers, scales, mixers, screeners, screens. Compressed air is one of the main tools we used at the plant, and we used a LOT of it. The compressors used in the plant were sometimes as large as a bedroom, and there were multiple.
The other large expense to the plant was electricity, because you have to power all of that machinery. There was once a trail that we were running on getting a new line set up to make toner. We had to test the grinder, and make sure it was running the way it was intended. Because of the contract that we agreed on with the electric company, starting that grinder for 15 MINUTES, costed us an extra $20,000 to $50,000 that month. I know that is a large range between there, but I don’t really remember the exact number. I know that the typical electric bill for the plant was around $100,000 a month.
In order to keep up with a specific ISO safety stander that we wanted, we once has to spend $2,500,000 on some safety valves. So if that doesn’t put into perceptive why toner isn’t cheap, I don’t know what will. The stuff costs so much for a reason. You are paying back for the amount of machinery used, power consumed, as well as QC to ensure you are receiving the same results time after time.
I’m going to end this post here, partially because I know this post is already an unorganized mess, and there are many more things I could talk about. But I also want to hear from you. Do you have any questions about toner productions? Obviously, I am willing to talk about some things, but I cannot release many other things, as there are trade secrets that I do not intend of giving away. While I haven’t agreed to any non-disclosures with that position, I do want to respect the company I worked for, and keep it as much of a secret from the strangers of the internet as possible.
So, what are your questions? Are there details that I need to explain further about these processes? What do you want to know about? If you comment, I will compile a list of the questions and answer them the best I can.