MONITORING AND TESTING | TECHNOLOGY
customers’ employees to carry out their work quickly and correctly,” Heitzinger says. “This is an important contribution towards achieving the highest possible system availability.” The Spare Parts Online shop, which has also been integrated into the new customer platform, also serves the same purpose. Here, Erema customers will not only find spare parts that can be ordered around the clock for their machines, but also their own order history, drawings, circuit diagrams, documentation, instruction manuals and photos. Convenient search functions and an intuitive user interface simplify and speed up the procurement process. “Digital networking is an important step on the way to integrating recycling know-how into the plastics value chain,” says Manfred Hackl. “With our smart technologies and the new BluPort customer platform, we are creating the conditions for developing new solutions together with our customers for cost-effective and environmentally sound optimisations in the process chain.” Starlinger showed a closed loop circular
packaging system for big bags made from woven polypropylene fabric within a quality assurance system at K2019. Worldwide, more than 380 million 4-loop big bags (or flexible intermediate bulk containers, FIBC) are sold every year; this equals an annual recycling potential of approximately 800,000 tonnes of material. With circular packag- ing, Starlinger says there is an elaborate concept for a closed loop for big bags that begins with PP granulate and leads back to PP regranulate (rPP) through the steps of production, usage, recovery and recycling. A closed loop has the advantage that production occurs within a quality assurance system, and the materials used are documented in a “material passport”. In cooperation with big bag manufacturers Louis Blockx and LC Packaging, Starlinger has simulated this loop and produced new big bags from fabric with high rPP content. Starlinger says that rPP big bags show the same quality as big bags made from virgin material in terms of tensile strength, weight and safety factor. The beginning of a closed loop requires a uniform material stream. After use, big bags are returned to the big bag filler; this guarantees that they are similar in composition and show the lowest possible degree of contamination, as they do not enter the post-consumer stream. At the FIBC manufacturer, the used big bags are shred- ded, washed, and processed into rPP on the Starlinger RecoStar Dynamic technology, yielding secondary raw materials for the production of new big bags. Apart from saving costs for raw materials, the recycling of big bags lowers the carbon
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footprint of this type of bulk packaging. “We have developed this concept because we would like to establish a circular economy for polypropylene fabric in which the recycled material is again pro- cessed into fabric – no downcycling involved,” says Hermann Adrigan, Starlinger Sales Director. “This can only succeed if the packaging is already designed with an eye on recyclability (design for recycling), and all process steps are perfectly matched.” For example, the circular packaging sewing process is performed without the use of polyester multifilament yarns. At the last K show, Starlinger
produced tape fabric from up to 100% rPET flakes. This year, the company installed the first projects using this technol- ogy for the production of big bags from recycled PET in Europe and Asia. “Since we have been intensively involved in the recycling and refinement of plastics for decades, the circular economy is an extremely important topic for Starlinger that is close to our business,” adds Adrigan. “Now we have used our extensive know- how to present our clients in the FIBC sector with a sustainable solution also for polypropylene fabric.” Even without recycling options, the carbon footprint of flexible big bags is far below that of rigid IBC containers such as drums or octabins because of their lower weight and space-saving transport. Analysis of recycled materials is also conducted
away from the recycling facility. International testing organisation Intertek says that it can provide insight and in-depth identification and analysis of the most commonly recycled plastics through nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), gel permeation chromatography (GPC), initial produc- tion check (ICP) and x-ray fluorescence (XRF). Intertek says that recycled plastics analysis is a topic which commands increasing attention, with many firms seeking to attain insight into the nature of plastics, to discover if they have been previously recycled, and if so, to what percentage. Addition- ally, analysis is sought regarding the purity of the material, especially regarding the presence of heavy metals, and into its molecular weight. By using these techniques Intertek can determine the composition of recycled materials, either as reclaim or as final product particularly in the manufacture of polyester-based materials. Polymer characterisa-
November/December 2019 | PLASTICS RECYCLING WORLD 47
Above: At K2019, Starlinger highlighted closed loop system for PP big bags within a quality assurance system
PHOTO: STARLINGER
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