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

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

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

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

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.

Glycolic Depolymerization versus Mechanical Bottle-to-Bottle Recycling

Glycol Turns the Extruder into a Turbo

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.

16:9

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

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.

High Demand of Plastic Recycling Machines

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”

Composite films are successfully used in the packaging industry to reduce the weight of the packaging material and to increase the product shelf life. Thus, they contribute significantly to CO2 reduction. However, due to functional requirements, composite structures often use incompatible plastics, which prevent recycling in proven mechanical re-extrusion processes. Solvent-based recycling processes offer an attractive and technically mature solution to tackle the challenge.

Flexible packaging materials have become indispensable in food and household goods packaging, for example for sausages, cheese, snacks or detergents and soap products. For optimum product protection, multi-layer structures are composed of different polymers, thus significantly extending the shelf life of food packaged in this way. Good sealability, light protection and water vapor barrier of polyolefins are combined with the good oxygen barrier or stiffness of EVOH, PET or PA. In terms of weight, the polyolefin content usually dominates in composite packaging, but such composite film structures also contain other intermediate layers as well as printing inks and aluminum – either as aluminum foil or as a vapor-deposited aluminum layer.

Physical Dissolution of Plastics from Composite Structures

From a recycling point of view, multilayer packaging is almost impossible to integrate into a circular economy due to the material heterogeneity, so that today’s models for assessing recyclability only attest good recyclability to composite packaging in exceptional cases. Instead they advise the use of mono-material multilayer composites made of combinations of PE and PP with small amounts of barrier layers. Whether these materials offer the same product protection as conventional packaging and whether real waste management is able to collect, sort and process these novel composites into high-quality recyclates with high yields is currently still subject of research and development activities.

For two decades the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging IVV has been working on innovative technical solutions for the recycling of complex plastic waste based on the physical dissolution of target plastics from compounds and composite structures. Compared to mechanical recycling, this achieves a very high cleaning potential. This is where CreaSolv comes into play, a registered trademark of Creacycle GmbH. The process is based on old patents describing the dissolution of polyolefins and combines these approaches with innovative and technically highly efficient cleaning technologies. The process was already developed in the early 2000s for various packaging wastes. Since that time it has been continuously optimized technically and economically, scaled up and repeatedly validated with industry partners. Due to its high cleaning capability, the process is particularly suitable for flexible packaging, both for composite films from industrial waste and for post-consumer waste of flexible packaging materials.

Successful Field Test: Industrial Pilot Plant Running in Indonesia

As early as the beginning of the 2010s, Unilever became aware of the CreaSolv process and evaluated it, first in the laboratory and then on a small-technical scale. The preferred application of the process was primarily small-volume multilayer film bags, so-called sachets, which have a high market share in Southeast Asia and are not subjected to adequate waste management there. Instead, they end up, at best, in large landfills, but realistically, unfortunately, far too often in the environment and ultimately contribute to the plastic pollution of waters and oceans. In cooperation with Unilever and Lömi GmbH, the process developers at the IVV designed an industrial CreaSolv plant, which was built in Germany and, after a short test phase, shipped to the site in Indonesia. After commissioning in 2018 and a ramp-up phase in early 2019, the plant has since been producing LDPE recyclate. Post-consumer multilayer film waste is used as input material, which is collected by waste pickers at Indonesian landfills and pre-cleaned. The recyclate is now successfully applied in new composite film packaging for detergents (Fig. 1).

Based on this successful initial plant, the European H2020 project MultiCycle was initiated at the end of 2018. As part of the project, it was intended to prove that the CreaSolv technology can be applied to other target polymers in multilayer packaging and plastic composites (including PP, PA, PA-GF or PET). For this purpose, a flexibly adaptable demonstrator plant was set up at a Lömi site. The plant is designed for alternating demonstration operation for different waste and plastic fractions and reaches a capacity of up to 25 kg/h, depending on the operating mode (Fig. 2).

MultiCycle Plant for a Wide Variety  of Plastic Fractions

At the above-mentioned Multicycle plant, post-consumer composite films as well as production waste from various composite films were processed into LDPE and PP recyclates. The table lists realistic product characteristics of the recyclates that are currently being sampled by Multicycle project partners and used for the production of non-food packaging demonstrators due to their virgin-like property profile.

After the end of the project, the demonstration plant will be available from the beginning of 2022 for further sampling trials with research and industry partners who want to test or evaluate solvent-based recycling on a pre-commercial scale. Recyclate quantities of 500 to 1000 kg can be produced at the plant under representative process conditions. The plant is not only used for the preparation and conceptual testing of new commercial plant projects, but can also help to prove the recyclability of plastic packaging. In order to be able to meet the numerous enquiries from industry, a second comparable demonstration capacity is currently being set up at the Fraunhofer IVV in Freising, Germany.

The industrial implementation of the CreaSolv technology is also being driven forward rapidly on a national basis. The data available from the aforementioned projects clearly prove the technical and economic attractiveness of the process on an industrial scale. This is shown by model calculations and business plans for large-scale industrial plants, which are based on the respective national framework conditions, site conditions and waste specifications. Against this background, the commercialization of CreaSolv is currently being investigated in more detail and continued in the r+ impuls Circular Packaging project funded by the German BMBF. For a site in north-eastern Bavaria, the project partners Lömi, Fraunhofer IVV and Lober GmbH & Co. Abfallentsorgungs KG are currently working on a commercial plant concept for flexible post-consumer packaging. The envisaged technology scale-up is accompanied by technical optimization tests on the one hand and results in detailed engineering for a commercial recycling plant on the other.

Economical Plant Operation  from 8000 t/a

For Germany and Central Europe, current calculations indicate economical plant operation from capacities of around 8000 t/a. Common waste fractions from the sorting plants of the German dual systems can be used as input, such as fractions 323 or 352.

Current product samples of LDPE and PP recyclates achieve a quality that allows their use in new packaging films with a high proportion of post-consumer recyclate (PCR). This depends on the film structure and area of application, but a PCR content of over 50 % is certainly achievable. The sample productions reveal that the maturity of the technology meets industrial requirements and that only a few technical details remain to be solved for commercial and technical scale-up.

Available test data, calculations and market developments confirm the team of process developers, plant engineers and waste management experts in their assumption that the solvent-based CreaSolv process can make a substantial contribution to the circular economy of complex plastic waste in the future, especially in the area of flexible packaging. The volume of this waste is immense and amounts to around 1 million t per year in Germany alone, which is currently mainly recycled as secondary fuel and thus removed from a plastics cycle. If solvent-based processes achieve only a market share of 20 % despite their significantly higher cleaning performance compared to mechanical recycling, this results in a potential of 10 to 20 processing plants with capacities of 10,000 to 20,000 t/a each. The development team will implement the technology in commercial industrial plants in close cooperation with investors and potential plant operators. Fraunhofer is acting as the process provider, while Lömi, together with its sister company GAW Technologies GmbH, is acting as the plant construction partner. As the operator of the first commercial CreaSolv plant for packaging plastics in Germany, Lober GmbH & Co. Abfallentsorgungs KG in Neuburg vorm Wald, Germany, stands at the forefront.

Fraunhofer-Institut für Verfahrenstechnik u Verpackung IVV 

https://www.ivv.fraunhofer.de

Ausgabenartikel

The CreaSolv technology enables recycling of laminated films. 

Table 1. Typical properties of a LDPE PCR compared to LDPE and LLDPE virgin material

Fig. 1. Blow film production in Indonesia based on recycled LDPE.

Fig. 2. The demonstration plant of Lömi GmbH processes up to 25 kg of different waste fractions per hour.

Name - Hauptartikel

Dr. Martin Schlummer is Business Field Manager Recycling and Environment at the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging IVV.

Jochen Neubauer is a packaging specialist for the closed-loop use of rPO at the Fraunhofer IVV.

Dr.-Ing. Fabian Knappich is group leader Implementation Polymer Recycling Plants at the Fraunhofer IVV.

Dr. Andreas Mäurer is head of the department of Process Development Polymer Recycling at the Fraunhofer IVV.

Ulrich Weig is head of the substitute fuels/industrial waste sorting of the Lober GmbH, Neunburg vorm Wald, Germany.

Marcel Backfisch is project manager at Lömi GmbH Grossostheim, Germany, a subsidiary of GAW Beteiligungs GmbH.

Alexander Rinderhofer is Managing Director of GAW Beteiligungs GmbH, Graz, Austria, and is responsible for the Recycling and Environmental Technology.

issue 08/2022

issue 07/2022

issue 06/2022

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