WEEE | INNOVATION
out the polymers that contain flame retardant additives. In addition, some materials that are removed during density separation may be ones that have value and should ideally be recycled. Another WEEE plastics challenge is a lack of common understanding of material “purity”, he said. A WEEE treatment plant considers “pure” to mean just the plastics fraction, separated from metals and other materials. But a plastics recycling company may consider “pure” to be a single polymer type, if it is producing sorted and shred- ded recyclate, or more precisely polymer with no contaminants and legacy additives, if it is produc- ing granules. At the end of the value chain, OEMs and plastics processors consider WEEE plastics to be “pure” only if they are identical to virgin plastics. Schlummer said the part of the WEEE plastics sector that has been working well is the one focussing on the sorted WEEE fraction containing engineering plastics. One positive development is the growing demand from OEMs for compounds containing a percentage of recycled polymers. He identified some successful WEEE plastics recycling companies in Europe that operate large scale industrial plants, with production in the range of 50,000tpa: Coolrec, MBA Polymers Austria (now MGG Polymers – see above), Galloo, Stena and Veolia. Consumer appliance brands have been working on projects to integrate plastics recycling into their supply chain. Philips has made progress in this area by working with European recyclers. In 2011, Philips launched the Senseo Viva Café Eco limited edition coffee machine, which featured many recycled plastic materials. It was the first commercial product it had made using post-consumer WEEE plastics, with recycled ABS supplied by MBA Polymers Austria. Philips also worked with PHB and AKG (now owned by Veolia) to reuse polypropylene from old Senseo machines, and it worked with CMB/MEWA Plastics to use polycar- bonate from recycled DVDs and CDs in a high-end laser textured topcover. “That was 2011, but it was far from the
end,” said Arnaud Robert, materials and finishing engineer at Philips. In his presentation at the Plastics Recycling
Technology 2017 conference, he said the company did a short production run of 100,000 units of the Senseo Viva Café Eco machine, proving it could incorporate recycled plastics in a commercial product. The success-
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ful materials performance in this pilot programme enabled Philips to launch Senseo Up and Senseo Switch in 2015 and 2016. Leveraging knowledge gained from the pilot programme, these ma- chines used recycled plastics, and also were a “step up” as the inner frame and baseplate were made from recycled plastics as well. The coffee machine project partially included closed loop recycling, but a vacuum cleaner it launched in 2017 showed that Philip’s ambi- tion is to achieve fully closed loop recycling. The Performer Ultimate FC8955 use materials from waste vacuum cleaners arising in collection schemes in Netherlands, Belgium and France. The lower and upper housings of the cleaner, plus two smaller parts, are made from recycled plastics. In total, 36% of the plastics (by weight) used in the cleaner and accessories is recycled. The group’s recycling partners are Coolrec and Veolia Polymers, both based in the Netherlands. Veolia Polymers supplies a 95% recycled PP compound, in which 30% is from old vacuum cleaners and 70% from other used plastics sources. The partnership between Philips and Veolia
Polymers started in 2010, said Gerrit Klein Nagel- voort, Manager of Business Development at Veolia Polymers. Speaking at a joint event on recom- pounding held by KraussMaffei Berstorff and Erema last year, he said Veolia Polymers has seen recycled PP output at its Vroomshoop plant in the Netherlands grow from 22,500tpa in 2010 to 40,000tpa in 2016 and the company was expecting to increase this further. The company supplies recycled material for various Philips products, including some vacuum cleaner models that contain 1.2-1.4kg of recycled PP. “Blending is the secret to our success for competing with virgin plastics,” he said. Electrolux is another domestic appliance group
that has a programme dedicated to plastics recycling. It is using a recycled PP compound, which it has named Carborec, in various product lines in major appliances. Ergorapido Plus Green, a vacuum cleaner made of 70% recycled plastics, was developed as a showcase product in 2011. Electrolux has a target to increase the volume of recycled plastic used to 20,000 tonnes annually by 2020. Until 2017, the group had been making good progress, and the amount of recycled plastic used in appliances had increased to 7,400 tonnes by 2016. However, in its most recent Sustainability
Above: Polypropylene from old vacuum cleaners is recycled and used in the Philips Performer Ultimate FC8955 cleaner
Left: The Ergorapido Plus Green is an Eletrolux vacuum cleaner made of 70% recycled plastics
March/April 2018 | PLASTICS RECYCLING WORLD 29
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