INNOVATION | WEEE AND ELV
running at full capacity at the AO Recycling facility in Telford.
AO.com is a large retailer selling all kinds of home appliances. Its recycling branch was looking for a solution to recycle plastics from refrigerators, so they could be re-used in new appliances. Service company All Controls put it in contact with Ad Rem. Jelle Saint-Germain is a sales engineer at Ad
Above: Plastics separation equipment at AO Recycling
targets for post-consumer thermoplastics in new cars,” they say.
Among other measures called for are incentives, which can take the form of tradable recycling certificates or tax breaks, to reward GHG savings stemming from recycling and the use of recycled materials in new products along the value chain. “These measures are all the more urgent given
the extremely negative impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on technical plastics recyclers to ensure that the current crisis situation will not further jeopardise the goals set by the European Strategy for Plastics,” say the associations. The joint message from EuRIC and EERA followed a February statement from EuRIC calling for more recycled plastics to be used in cars. Paul Mayhew, President of EuRIC’s Plastic Recycling Branch (EPRB) and General Manager at the UK arm of major recycler MBA Polymers, says the binding post-consumer recycled content targets for thermoplastics in cars of 25% by 2025, 30% by 2030 and 35% by 2035 are “entirely realistic. They reflect what frontrunners in the automotive industry already do in some of their flagship models or are planning to do thanks to mature technologies for high quality plastics recycling from ELVs developed by the industry over the last two decades. What is missing in order to make current best practices the norm, is binding targets which provide the certainty needed by recyclers to scale up existing facilities and invest into new ones.” Meanwhile, some commercial operations are, despite everything, achieving notable success. For example, Hamos Recycling- und Separation- stechnik in Germany, which specialises in electro- static separation technology, recently cooperated with Belgian company Ad Rem, a joint venture between machine building group Valtech and recycler Galloo, on a line for WEEE plastics recy- cling in the UK. The first plant of its kind is now
40 PLASTICS RECYCLING WORLD | July/August 2020
Rem. “Over 4m tonnes of e-waste is collected in the EU and UK annually, of which more than 500,000 tonnes are recyclable PE, PP, PS and ABS,” he says. “Currently, most of those plastics are not being recovered.” The Telford operation starts with the WEEE plastics mix, which is sent through an Ad Rem flotation system, operating on a density of 1.09. “To obtain the correct density, we add a patented
pH-neutral agent to water,” says Saint-Germain. “As opposed to the traditional use of salt, this agent does not dissolve into water, but remains in suspension, which enables us to recover and reuse it. It is a cheap substance that does not interfere with the electrostatic separation downstream, which is why this technology is so suitable to combine with the Hamos technology.” In subsequent steps, the PE/PP is separated from the PS/ABS in a second flotation tank running on water, after which the PS/ ABS is separated using a Hamos electrostatic line. The plant was commissioned last October and is
currently fully operational, processing 4 tph of fridge plastics (20,000 tpa). Ad Rem says it and Hamos will continue to fine-tune the process. Ad Rem has sold a similar project in Japan, for producing 40,000 tpa of recycled plastics. Planic’s facility will process material coming from various sources such as automobiles, home appliances, palettes and containers, as well as packaging materials from distribution centres and shopping centres. Located in Omaezaki City, it should be fully operational by mid-2021.
CLICK ON THE LINKS FOR MORE INFORMATION: �
https://mgg-polymers.com �
www.eera-recyclers.com �
www.tomra.com �
http://nontox-project.eu �
www.ivv.fraunhofer.de �
www.norner.no �
www.aimplas.es �
www.iwks.fraunhofer.de �
https://euric-aisbl.eu �
www.hamos.com �
www.adrecyclingmachines.com �
www.ao-recycling.com �
www.clariant.com �
https://lavergne.ca
www.plasticsrecyclingworld.com
IMAGE: AD REM
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