TECHNOLOGY | PET RECYCLING
IMAGE: VIRIDOR
has supported us with their reliable equipment and technology, meeting the highest quality specifica- tions and rising quality requirements of the customers, and handling the entire variability of raw materials. As for the new line, the technical discussions with Starlinger started two years ago, ensuring that the line is equipped with the latest technology and meets all standards to achieve top quality in rPET resin production. Believing in the decontamination efficiency of Starlinger technol- ogy and their excellent customer support, BariQ again choose Starlinger for the expansion project.” The expansion is expected to be finished in
Above: Viridor’s £317m facility in Avonmouth, UK, was formally opened in March
Viridor opens major UK recycling facility
In March, a large-scale UK recycling facility for plastics packaging, which is expected to cut the UK’s plastic waste exports by circa 8%, was opened by government minister Jo Churchill. Waste manage- ment group Viridor’s £317m facility in Avonmouth co-locates plastics recycling and an energy recovery facility in one building. The facility has the capacity to reprocess over 80,000 tpa of packaging waste including bottles, tubs, and trays, and is produc- ing rPET, rPP and rHDPE. The Viridor facility – which is expected to produce 60,000 tpa of
recycled plastics, including 18,000 tpa of food-grade PET – is well equipped with sensor-based sorting technology from Tomra Recycling. The technology company says 15 Autosort units and six Autosort Flake units have been installed at the plant. Following a standard mechanical pre-sorting process, the infeed material is split across three dedicated sorting lines, one for PET, one for HDPE and one for PP. The Autosort units use near infrared (NIR) technology and visual
spectrometers to identify and separate materials according to material type and colour. The Autosort Flake units then sort the material to the highest purity levels required by Viridor for onward sale as food-grade material. At Viridor Avonmouth, the four targeted end fractions are clear PET, natural HDPE, jazz (coloured) HDPE and PP. Amut’s Ecotech plant engineering business designed and developed Viridor’s Avonmouth facility with an integrated washing plant using Amut technology. Piergianni Milani, Amut Group’s President says: “We are extremely proud to contribute with our technology, to this environmentally-friendly waste management project, aimed at giving plastic a new life, and thus helping to respect the planet. As a leading innovator we keep on delivering our clients advanced solutions matching with the prevailing circular economy model.”
36 PLASTICS RECYCLING WORLD | March/April 2022
2023. BariQ then aims to recycle 3.5m PET bottles per year, producing 35,000 tonnes of food-grade rPET for new bottles and saving 80,000 tonnes of CO2. BariQ supplies the food-grade rPET to major converters and brand-owners in Europe and worldwide. The contracts for the new equipment were signed during a ceremony held on 13 February 2022, at the BariQ plant located in the CPC Industrial Park, 6th October City, Giza. It’s not just bottle-to-bottle recycling for which
PET is receiving attention. More projects and installations are appearing in which rPET trays are the final object of production. Amut and Erema have a strategic partnership focused on PET recycling lines which are integrated with sheet extrusion to produce rPET sheet for thermoforming food trays. Last year, the partners installed and commissioned Alto Packaging´s first extrusion line for food grade PET sheets in New Zealand. Amut says the advantage of combining Erema’s
Vacurema PET recycling technology and the Amut Inline Sheet production technology is the avoid- ance of an extra process stage. It says: “This is because the melt goes straight from the Vacurema 1716 T Basic to the Amut plant without the detour of pelletising. The post-consumer PET material is already decontaminated and pre-dried prior to extrusion in the vacuum reactor of the Vacurema Basic, with a throughput of up to 1,500 kg per hour. After high capacity filtration by Erema’s SW-RTF backflush filter and online IV measurement, the melt goes directly into the Amut Inline Sheet plant where it is processed into thermoforming sheet from 0.15 mm to 1.2 mm thickness. The monolayer thermoforming sheet produced from pure rPET is not only 100 % food contact compliant, it also fulfils the FDA and further regulations. At Alto, it is further processed into trays and food containers.” Amut also provided downstream equipment to
Alto, ranging from the Automatic Tdie, three rolls stack calender with automatic gap control and
www.plasticsrecyclingworld.com
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