High level of attendance at the world‘s largest trade fair for environmental technologies; Key topic: using and reusing resources efficiently

2984 exhibitors and around 119,000 visitors confirmed the fair as the most important platform for environmental technologies.

16:9

Verbände, Institutionen, Messen

Dienstleistungen

Recycling

Umweltmanagement

Messeveranstalter

Kunststoff-Recycling

Kunststoffverarbeitung: Verfahren

Kunststoff-Aufbereitung

Kreislaufwirtschaft

IFAT: Focus on Closed Cycles

Sabic cooperates with UPM Raflatac to introduce a packaging label material based on recycled ocean bound plastic.

Kunststoffe

Photonik

Optik

Standardkunststoffe

Kunststoff Werkstoffe

Thermoplaste

First Label Material from Marine Plastics

Strategic partnership delivers best practice example of a closed recycling loop for PET-based multilayer.

Best practice example of a closed recycling loop for PET-based multilayer.

Verpackungsmittel aus Kunststoffen

Kunststoffverarbeitung

Verpackungsmaterial

Logistik

Polyethylenterephthalat

Technische Kunststoffe

Closed Recycling Loop for PET-Based Multilayer

Recyclable TPU material from Covestro meets high requirements and passes health safety testing.

The bag manufacturer is working with various industry partners to develop a truck tarp that can be reprocessed as often as required into new products, even after a long life as a bag.

Freitag Initiates Recyclable Truck Tarp

Neste acquires European rights to Alterra Energy’s thermochemical liquefaction technology.

Alterra Energy’s industrial-scale waste plastics liquefaction unit in Akron, OH/USA.

Acquisition in the Thermochemical Liquefaction Technology Area

In the new recycling pilot plant, customers have the opportunity to develop, test and directly implement new process steps.

The Recycling Innovation Center will be built in the immediate neighborhood of the existing Test Center for bulk materials handling.

Unternehmen

kunststoffe.de

Coperion Builds Recycling Innovation Center

CMG presents the EV916 and EV616 models of its Evoluzione series for wet or dry granulation with a granulation capacity from 2000 to over 5000 kg/h.

High capacity shredding and grinding system.

Granulators for Post-Consumer Recycling

The IKV is researching digital solutions for better description and classification of recyclates. The aim is to increase the actual recyclate use rates. Results will be presented at the IKV colloquium in September.

PlasticBOND: Schematic illustration of the platform design to be developed.

Digitale Transformation

Wirtschaft

Innovationen und neue Technologie

Kunststoff-Rezyklat

Research to Improve Recyclate Use

Way2K: Interview with Jan Hendrik Ostgathe, Managing Director of Kreyenborg GmbH & Co. KG

Jan Hendrik Ostgathe, Managing Director of Kreyenborg GmbH & Co.

Messe K-Kunststoffmesse

kunststoffe-international.com

“In the Circular Economy, We Generate Impulses for Each Other” 

Steinert.view is a flexible and reliable monitoring solution for Steinert sensor-based sorting machines. It gives users insight into the availability and output of individual machines, allowing them to learn more about the condition of their applications or sorting facility.

<a href="https://steinertglobal.com/steinert-digital/steinert-view/" target="_blank">Steinert.view</a> in mobile use: the app is available for a wide range of devices and display sizes.

Real-Time Data Visualization

IKV develops recyclable packaging solutions with the help of plasma technologies and presents the current state of research at the IKV colloquium in September.

Oberflächenbeschichtung

Holz

Recyclable Barrier Systems for Sustainable Packaging

Mohinani is bringing PET bottle-to-bottle recycling to West Africa and is buying two Starlinger plants for this purpose.

The recoSTAR PET iV+ recycling lines produce food-grade rPET that can be used up to 100% in PET preform production.

Bottle-to-Bottle-Recycling in Ghana

European project on increased use of recycled plastics in electronics has started.

The project partners are developing new data-based sorting systems that prevent potentially dangerous substances from entering the plastics recycling loop.

Elektrotechnik, Elektronik

Recycle Plastics from Old Electronic Devices

Decathlon launch the first recycled and recyclable bodyboard made from Arpro. The used plastic 15% maritime industry waste and is a more sustainable material. The basis for this is plastic waste from the ocean.

Boy using the Radbug bodyboard made from ARPRO 35 Ocean.

Sportgeräte

Surfing with Recycled Plastics

For three decades, sustainability has been the focus of the family-owned company Krall Kunststoff-Recycling in Elsenfeld am Main.

Today, the company has almost 40 employees.

30 Years of Krall Kunststoff-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 01/2023

issue 09/2022

issue 08/2022

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