Each year, more than one million tons of plastic waste are generated in Kenya – so far unused. T3 wants to change this and invests in a bottle-to-bottle recycling plant from Starlinger.

Around 1,334,000 tons of plastic become waste in Kenya each year.

16:9

Recycling

Umweltmanagement

Polyethylenterephthalat

Kunststoff Werkstoffe

Thermoplaste

Kunststoff-Recycling

Kunststoffverarbeitung: Verfahren

Kunststoff-Aufbereitung

Unternehmen

kunststoffe.de

Kreislaufwirtschaft

Starlinger Installs First Plant in Kenya

The company will build a modern plant in Ballito in the South African province of KwaZulu Natal by autumn 2024.

From 2025, the internationally active packaging and recycling specialist will produce around 35,000 tonnes of rPET per year at its new recycling plant in South Africa.

Verpackungsmittel aus Kunststoffen

Kunststoffverarbeitung

Alpla Builds New Plant in South Africa

Duytan Plastic Recycling will increase its reprocessing capacity to 60,000 tons of plastics.

Duytan Plastic Recycling is the first PET bottle-to-bottle recycler in Vietnam.

Vietnamese Recycler Installs Third Starlinger Line

RCS Plastics processes PET flakes into high-quality regranulate for preform and beverage bottle manufacturers. To ensure the required food quality of the recycled material, the company relies on Sikora technology for the quality control of the rPET flakes and pellets.

Cedric Steeg, Employee in Quality Assurance, holds material sample in front of the Puritiy Concept V.

Qualitätssicherung

Kunststoff-Rezyklat

Check Food Quality of Recyclates

With two Starlinger recoSTAR PET bottle-to-bottle recycling lines, Piedmont-based Dentis Recycling Italy S.r.l. expanded its product portfolio and now offers food-grade rPET pellets in addition to hot-washed PET bottle flakes

The Starlinger recoSTAR PET 330 HC iV+ bottle-to-bottle recycling lines produce bottle-grade rPET and have a production capacity of up to 3.3 tons per hour each.

Länderspecial Italien

kunststoffe-international.com

Dentis Launches New Food-Grade rPET Brand

The increasing demand for recyclates and the shortage of food-grade PET flakes pose challenges for batch quality and color consistency.

Repi offers various additives for recycling PET, which can be used, for example, to prevent the material from darkening.

Messe K-Kunststoffmesse

Additive

Compensating for Darkening in Recycled PET

New Plastic Heroes: The start-up ForPET worked with industry partners to develop a technology for the production of foamed rPET.

Sergey Nikitenko (in the photo) founded the start-up in 2021 with Mikhail Iakobachvili and Dmitrii Rastorguev. 

ForPET worked with industry partners to develop a technology for the production of foamed rPET.

New Plastic Heroes: ForPET

Start up

Wirtschaft

Unternehmen und Unternehmer

Ehrhardt, Melanie

Verpackungstechnik

Recycling: Foaming instead  of Dreaming

The new plant will immediately produce an approximate 18,000 tons per year of recycled material from near-household collection.

At the new plant, the joint venture produces recycled PET granulate based on bottles from household waste for the production of new preforms and bottles.

Alpla Starts rPET Production in Romania

German specialist for chemical PET recycling expands capacity by up to 200 t of used plastic bottles per day.

From left to right: Jan van Kisfeld Managing Director), Dr. Vivek Tandon (Founder ) and Benjy Thompson (CEO of the Development Authority of Bulloch County).

Revalyu Builds Major Facility in the USA

Amazon is looking for early-stage start-ups with a focus on recycling: the second Amazon Sustainability Accelerator is starting, and European companies can still apply until March 17.

Amazon Sustainability Accelerator 2023: the deadline for applications is 17 March 2023 and successful applicants will be announced in the Spring.

Amazon Looks for Innovative Recycling-Start-ups

Südpack sees it as its responsibility to contribute towards the circular economy and aims to develop into a zero-waste company.

Sustainability can have many faces: mechanical and chemical recycling, design for recycling, reduction of the CO2 footprint, etc.

Recyclable Materials Management Is the Way to the Goal

Logistik

Zero Waste – Utopia or Reality?

Dr. Norbert Niessner “Recycling of Plastics”: An in-depth guide to the very latest global plastics recycling insights.

Dr. Norbert Niessner: .“The problem isn‘t plastics, but collection systems and recycling initiatives that are not fit for purpose.“

All Your Questions Answered

Tomra opened a second test facility at its headquarters in Germany to meet growing demand for material trials.

F.l.t.r.: Volker Rehrmann (EVP and Head of Tomra Recycling), Fabrizio Radice (VP and Head of Global Sales and Marketing), Tove Andersen (CEO), Tom Eng (SVP and Head of Tomra Recycling Sorting), André Lehmann (Test Center Manager)

Tomra Expands Capacities in Germany

The winners of the seven awards will be announced on 11 May, the second day of the Plastics Recycling Show Europe at the RAI Amsterdam, where all 47 finalists will be showcased.

Verbände, Institutionen, Messen

Dienstleistungen

Finalists Announced for Plastics Recycling Awards Europe 2023

Recycling as a business model: the start-up HolyPoly wants to bring more high-quality products made from recycled plastic onto the market.

Johanna Bialek, co-foundeer of the start-up and head of human resources and organizational development , and Fridolin Pflüger, founding member.

“Recycling Is More than a  Trendy Topic“

Early March saw Tomra open a second testing center at its German headquarters. Located in Mülheim-Kärlich, it will test out various sorting processes for different materials, focusing above all on assessing how effectively plastic waste is sorted.

At the beginning of March, Tomra opened a second testing center at its German head office to conduct thorough testing on a wider range of sorting processes.

Mülheim-Kärlich, Germany, with a population of just under 11,000 is situated in northern Rhineland-Palatinate. Wikipedia informs us that the sights include the Old Chapel in the Town Hall, the Roman Villa, numerous half-timbered houses and an educational fruit trail with over 250 trees and shrubs. But all this seems to have left the close-to 200 visitors who came to Mülheim-Kärlich from February 28 to March 2, 2023 relatively underwhelmed. Instead, their prime focus was on waste sorting Namely, the waste sorting conducted at Tomra. The company opened its second test center at its German head office.

On the first conference day, participants listened to presentations detailing the company’s strategic direction. The second day focused on the extension of the test facilities. “Ever-stricter legal regulations and higher recycling targets have seen the demand for recovering valuable materials from waste skyrocket, triggering an upsurge in demand for our sorting solutions and material tests. We‘ve been monitoring this trend over the past few years and have seen the testing capacity in Germany gradually reach its limits,” said Fabrizio Radice, VP and Head of Global Sales and Marketing at Tomra Recycling Sorting.

Previously, the company housed all of its waste and metal sorting machines in a single building. Now, with the new facility up and running, Tomra has a total of eight testing facilities at seven global locations, providing recyclers and plant operators alike with the chance to test their materials on sorting machines before making an investment. „We are constantly developing new sorting systems, all of which are installed in our testing center. As well as handling the growing demand for testing, we have rolled out several new products to the market over the past few years and plan to launch more in future. To ensure that we can accommodate our expanding portfolio, we have decided to invest in an additional building,“ adds Radice. Until recently, the company conducted around 500 to 600 customer and internal tests each year, and expects demand to continue rising in future.

While the facility already in place tests the waste sorting process, the new facility is solely focused on metal sorting. During the official opening, the industry partners, customers, and media representatives in attendance had the chance to witness a range of demo lines in action, including two for sorting polyethylene terephthalate (PET) packaging waste.

High Levels of Purity Achieved in Flake Sorting

One of the demo lines was dedicated to smart flake sorting, which according to Tomra, is becoming increasingly important. Context: Most plastic production comprises polyolefins and the packaging industry. As recycling quotas become increasingly stringent and the gap between supply and demand widens still further, recycling, and therefore color sorting of polyolefins, is becoming increasingly important. Sorting flakes accurately is key to achieving high-quality recycled materials, alongside washing as well as being a crucial benchmark to determine recyclate quality.

This was amply demonstrated at Mülheim-Kärlich, as PET flakes were sorted. However, before reaching this point, the original products involved, e.g. PET bottles, undergo several steps. Only after pre-sorting, removal of impurities based on color and material type, and subsequent washing process, are the bottles then crushed into flakes.

However, the resulting flakes still contain high levels of other plastics, such as polypropylene from bottle caps, polyvinyl chloride from label remnants, metal particles and other impurities. Consequently, the flakes undergo an intensive cleaning process involving various combinations of metal separators, sieves, air separators, and several steps of hot and cold washing (rinsing and drying). The individual processing steps help minimize impurities as far as possible.

No matter how fractional the impurities or color variations, they still have an adverse impact on the recycled material quality. Accordingly, the goal is to produce PET granules with quality identical to virgin material, by eliminating contaminants. Highly advanced sensor-based technology allows the flakes to be cleaned and any residual contamination removed, achieving purity levels of up to 99 %. The resulting PET granules are perfect for producing new beverage bottles.

An Integrated Approach Saving Time and Money

For Tomra, achieving high levels of purity in recycled materials is contingent on having an integrated approach, in other words, a system combining pre-sorting and flake sorting. The former process allows bottles to be separated, not only from other plastic types but also by the color of the material. Precise pre-sorting is an important step, since it reduces most color and material impurities. When the bottles are crushed and transformed into flakes, the remaining impurities can be easily detected and sorted using highly sensitive sensors. Deploying integrated systems to pre-sort plastics before flake sorting paves the way to fine-tune the sorting performance to match the quality of the input material and impurities. This enables high levels of purity to be achieved while simultaneously boosting overall efficiency.

Plant operators can look forward to numerous improvements – both operationally and financially. Pre-sorting materials efficiently helps ease the need for manual sorting, since sorting technology can remove most contaminants. And this, in turn, allows a reduction in operating costs, or provides scope to allocate personnel resources elsewhere.

Notable Success when Recycling  PET Trays

The second demo for plastic packaging demonstrated scope to separate PET bottles and PET trays. While PET bottles are a prime example of a closed loop system, there remains room for improvement when it comes to PET trays. Although they are also recycled, the quantities are very small. Moreover, instead of creating new trays, they are normally used instead to produce textiles fibers, which is far from a real circular economy.

Progress with the recycling of PET shells depends on all the players in the value chain getting on board: Processors should be sparing with foreign materials in and on the shell to ensure the material remains as recyclable as possible. The recycling companies must remember to selectively sort the trays and the material PET trays from the outset when washing and processing the material.

TOMRA Sorting GmbH  

https://www.tomra.com

Ausgabenartikel

Also at the beginning of March, Tomra opened a second testing center at its German head office to conduct thorough testing on a wider range of sorting processes.

Fabrizio Radice: “Stricter legal regulations and higher recycling targets have seen the demand to recover valuable materials from waste soar to a record high.“

View of a demolition line: in Mülheim-Kärlich, Tomra has all the equipment as well as sets of machinery on site and can thus adapt the setting individually.

Opening of the test center (left to right): Volker Rehrmann (EVP and Head of Tomra Recycling), Fabrizio Radice (VP and Head of Global Sales and Marketing), Tove Andersen (CEO), Tom Eng (SVP and Head of Tomra Recycling Sorting), André Lehmann (Test Center Manager).

Tomra - me

PET Recycling: Testing Out the Circular Economy 

Read the German version of the article in our magazine Kunststoffe or at <a href="https://www.kunststoffe.de/a/fachartikel/branchentreffen-der-packaging-industrie-3533989" target="_blank">www.kunststoffe.de</a>

issue 09/2023

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