Erema enters a new dimension with large-scale recycling plants. Up to 40,000 tonnes per year of rPET can now be produced. The first plant of this size has been shipped to Brazil.

The reactor of the Vacurema T large-scale plant almost reaches the roof of the new Erema production hall, which was commissioned in 2021.

Polyethylenterephthalat

Kunststoff Werkstoffe

Thermoplaste

Extrusionsanlagen

Kunststoffverarbeitung: Maschinen und Komponenten

Extrusions-Zubehör

Kunststoff-Recycling

Kunststoffverarbeitung: Verfahren

Kunststoff-Aufbereitung

XXL Recycling Plant for Brazil

The growing demand for plastic recycling directly reflects the machine sales for Polystar. By the end of April 2022, a total of over 110 recycling machines will have been shipped within 12 months – twice as many compared to last year.

The new factory in Sinji industrial park is the third Polystar manufacturing facility in Taiwan.

Kreislaufwirtschaft

Sales Doubled for Polystar in 2021

The growing demand for plastic recycling directly reflects the machine sales for Polystar. By the end of  April 2022, a total of over 110 recycling machines will have been shipped within 12 months – twice as many compared to last year.

LDPE film recycling machine for postindustrial waste are on demand all over the world.

16:9

High Demand of Plastic Recycling Machines

Repeats (Recycled PE at Scale) Group, a pan-European platform for LDPE recycling, made an investment in the Spanish recycling company Anviplas.

Aleix Vintró, CEO Anviplas, and Joan Vintró at the Navacles plant. An Intarema 1716 TVEplus from Erema is in operation there. 

Anviplas Becomes Part of the Repeats Group

Additives manufacturer Milliken has developed viscosity modifiers specifically for recycled polypropylene (rPP). The products, called DeltaFlow, improve the flow behavior of rPP for extrusion and injection molding processes, according to the company.

The modifiers allow recycled PP to be processed at lower temperatures. Among other things, this reduces cycle times during injection molding.

Additive

Improved Processing of Recycled PP

Together, the two companies want to tackle the challenge of plastic packaging waste and its recycling.

The partnership between Borealis and Reclay aims to accelerate the shift to a circular plastics economy.

Borealis and Reclay Establish Strategic Partnership

Researchers from the University of Birmingham, U.K., and Duke University, U.S., have created a new family of polymers from sustainable sources that retain all of the same qualities as common plastics, but are also degradable and mechanically recyclable.

Kunststoffe, biobasiert

Biokunststoffe

Recyclable Plastics Based on Sugars

Aimplas has completed a project to recover end-of-life fishing nets and other marine litter to manufacture furniture made of 100 % recycled plastic.

At an event at the Innsomnia facilities in the Port of Valencia, a bench was unveiled measuring 6 m long and weighing more than 800 kg. It is made of recycled plastic profiles with 15 % fishing nets and other marine litter.

Marine Litter Furniture for the Marina of Valencia

BariQ for Techno and Advanced Industries celebrates the signing for constructing a new PET bottle-to-bottle recycling plant that will feature the latest plastic sorting systems from Tomra Recycling in Giza Governorate, Egypt.

On February 13, BariQ officially announced and celebrated the construction of a new bottle-to-bottle recycling facility in Giza Governorate, Egypt.

New PET Bottle-to-Bottle Recycling Plant in Egypt

Chinaplas 2022, to be held from April 25 to 28, will bring together more than 4000 exhibitors of the plastics and rubber industries from all over the world to launch innovative green solutions.

The 3rd Chinaplas x CPRJ Plastics Recycling and Circular Economy Conference and Showcase will be held one day prior to the show in Shanghai (photo from last year’s event).

Kunststoffe

Photonik

Optik

Verbände, Institutionen, Messen

Dienstleistungen

Kunststoff-Verpackungsmaschine

Sondermaschinen

Kunststoff

Bauwesen

Baustoffe

The Theme Color of the Show Is Green

In addition to mechanical recycling, chemical recycling is increasingly coming into focus for more challenging plastic streams. This article provides an overview of different recycling processes – and the challenges that arise, particularly in the area of food packaging as a result of regulations or the cost-effectiveness of the process.

Chemical recyclers and raw material producers rely heavily on processes that are covered by the collective term thermal conversion, which includes pyrolysis.

How Chemical and Mechanical Recycling Complement Each Other

Colleagues or Competitors?

BariQ is expanding and upgrading its existing plant with another Starlinger PET recycling system and an additional solid-state-polycondensation (SSP) reactor.

Andreas Pechhacker, General Manager Starlinger recycling technology, Mostafa Khairat, CEO BariQ, and Tasos Bereketidis, Sales Director Emerging Markets at Tomra Sorting Recycling, signed the contracts for the plant expansion.

Starlinger Recycling System for BariQ

Sorting plays a crucial role in the processing of plastic waste. Systems based on artificial intelligence are one way of improving this. Sorting systems manufacturer Tomra has recently presented corresponding technologies. Kunststoffe spoke about this with Felix Flemming and Valerio Sama from Tomra. In the interview, they explain what progress can be made with it, how important digitalization is for this and what improvements it means for food packaging.

Interview on the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Waste Sorting

Streifinger, Florian

Recycling

Umweltmanagement

Deep Learning

Datenanalyse

Machine Learning / Künstliche Intelligenz für die spanende Fertigung

Industrie 4.0

Industrie 4.0 für die spanende Fertigung

“AI Has Great Potential for  Sorting Food Packaging”

Statutory recyclate quotas and the specifications of brand-name producers are weighing heavily on the packaging branch these days and turning recyclate availability into a hot issue. Some polymers are simply not available in sufficient amounts. Experts at the 31st Dresden Packaging Conference provided insights into the current situations and explained why the situation could worsen in the future.

Recyclates of many polymer types are hard to get right now.

Verpackungsmaterial

Logistik

Kunststoff-Rezyklat

Hard-to-Find Recylates

Over the last year, the German branch of the Association of Plastics Manufacturers, PlasticsEurope Deutschland, consistently advocated the technology of chemical recycling. Meanwhile, chemical recycling has not only been criticized by environmental organizations but also from parts of the industry. Kunststoffe interviewed Ingemar Bühler, CEO of the Association, about this criticism and the competition between mechanical and chemical recycling. In the interview, Bühler also addresses further requirements for a circular economy with plastics and explains why he considers a label for plastics products a sensible idea.

Interview with Ingemar Bühler from PlasticsEurope Deutschland

Schröder, Susanne

“There’s No Point in Arguing over Chemical versus Mechanical Recycling”

Glycolic Depolymerization versus Mechanical Bottle-to-Bottle Recycling

Conventional PET recycling lines are based on single-screw extruders with maximum output rates of two and a half tons per hour. Since 2004, KraussMaffei has been researching a process to significantly increase these quantities with the help of glycol and the use of a twin-screw extruder. Given the current high demand for rPET materials, this technology is becoming increasingly important.

The recycling and new production of PET bottles is probably the best-known process in the field of plastics recycling. This process, in which sorted PET plastic bottles are washed, melted, filtered and pelletized before they are used as base material for new PET bottles, has for many years been one of the very few established recycling technologies. In general, a PET reuse rate of over 30 % is currently achieved worldwide.

In view of the growing demand for recycled plastics, the requirements in terms of material quantity and quality have also increased substantially. The established processes applied in this field are based on single-screw systems and achieve throughput rates of up to 2.5 t per hour and machine. Against this background and in view of the fact that polymer structures can be rebuilt to achieve the quality level of virgin material, glycolytic decomposition of PET materials is gaining increasing attention. As early as in 2004, KraussMaffei put into operation the first lines designed for this type of process, the interest in which has grown significantly in recent years.

Sustainability Takes Center Stage – Less Focus on Prices

In the past few years, this trend has been further fueled by declining prices for PET virgin material, so that only the use of large-scale machines ensures profitability. While the price for PET virgin material was rising before 2010 and already minor quantities of rPET were considered competitive from a purely economic point of view, the situation has changed drastically since.

Today, PET polymer producers are focusing on the use of rPET also for reasons of sustainability. In PET production, several metric tons of rPET are now added during glycolytic decomposition in the same process, so that twin-screw extruders are further gaining ground.

The process offered by KraussMaffei starts with the feeding system, which then transfers the material to the twin-screw extruder. Here, the washed and dried flakes are melted and homogenized while any adhering moisture and low-boiling contamination are removed via the vacuum degassing dome. Liquid glycol is then injected into the processing section and homogeneously mixed. The chemical reaction thus triggered decomposes and shortens the polymer chains, which results in the formation of oligomers. The PET bottle fraction with an intrinsic viscosity of 0.7 to 0.8 dl/g is thus converted into a low-viscosity melt. The viscosity can be decreased in a controlled manner, with an IV value between 0.5 and 0.2 dl/g being generally required for the subsequent process steps. This is where the exceptional strength of the process becomes apparent: the lower the viscosity, the finer the filters that can be used in the following process step.

Filters with a filter grade of 60 µm or better ensure that even extremely small contaminants are reliably removed from the melt. With the PET production process used in the large-scale petrochemical industry, the recycled low-viscosity melt is subsequently fed into the final reactor together with the material flow coming from the reactor for virgin material. Here, this input material is repolymerized into long-chain polymers with the desired intrinsic viscosity value.

Achieving an IV value of 0.2 dl/g places high demands on the machine and process. The seals and the tolerance values of extruder, melt pumps and filters must be perfectly adapted for this purpose. KraussMaffei achieves this goal through extremely tight manufacturing tolerances and “quality made in Germany”.

In view of the market demand for the use of the finest filter stages, numerous tests were carried out in KraussMaffei’s process laboratories in order to achieve an IV value of 0.2 dl/g and lower. In addition to the lowest possible viscosity, the objective was not to use any additives in order to obtain a high melt quality without any foreign substance. The addition of high amounts of glycol was a major challenge, as there were no downstream reactors available in the process laboratory to repolymerize the material and repelletization was therefore not possible. A viscosity of 0.15 dl/g was achieved in the trials and the melt was discharged by means of a gear pump. The tests confirmed that this viscosity value could be obtained by using 2 to 3 % of glycol and that it is not increased or decreased by adding a higher amount of glycol.

During all these tests involving the handling of ethylene and glycol quantities, special attention must be paid to protective measures in accordance with the Atex directive due to the flash and boiling point. On the one hand, any leaks in the glycol feeding system may cause ignition or deflagration when glycol ignites on hot surfaces of the extruder or vaporizes and subsequently catches fire. On the other hand, the glycol vapors escaping from the melt can also ignite or trigger deflagration. Such a vapor formation is particularly noticeable in the case of higher proportions of glycol (> 5 %).

Thanks to the low viscosity, filters with an even finer mesh width can be used. The melt quality is thus additionally improved, which allows the share of recycled material in the final product to be increased. A further reduction in viscosity is conceivable through the incorporation of additives or the use of new processes in order to install even finer filters, which could possibly remove even coarse color pigments. It is obvious that the twin-screw extruder for this type of process is an excellent alternative to conventional methods. The high output rates and the unparalleled quality achieved by KraussMaffei will further fuel this development.

KraussMaffei Extrusion GmbH  

https://www.kraussmaffei.com/de/startseite

Ausgabenartikel

The above diagram illustrates the operation of the twin-screw extruder during rPET production, where exact metering, extrusion and filtering of the glycol mixture are essential.

Name - Hauptartikel

 Franz-Xaver Keilbach has been Application Owner Circular Economy/Recycling at KraussMaffei since 2020.

Daniel Prizinitzki has been Process Engineer Compounding at KraussMaffei since 2017.

issue 08/2022

issue 07/2022

issue 06/2022

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