Coperion delivers bottle-to-bottle recycling plant to Indian packaging converter
Coperion and Herbold Meckesheim collaborate to deliver an entire plant for bottle-to-bottle recycling for Indian preform and plastic packaging manufacturer Magpet Polymer Pvt.
Coperion and Herbold Meckesheim collaborate to deliver an entire plant for bottle-to-bottle recycling.
The bottle-to-bottle plants enable all recyclates to be processed together, even if they exhibit different IV (Intrinsic Viscosity) values or fluctuating bulk densities.
The PET bottle recycling system has a throughput of 5,500 kg/h. It will deliver PET recyclate that is approved by the European Food Safety Administration (EFSA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for direct contact with food.
All processes in one line
The recycling system encompasses all process steps leading up to extrusion with a ZSK twin screw extruder, including pelletizing and an SSP (Solid State Polycondensation) reactor.
The system first processes the PET bottles into flakes. For this purpose, Herbold uses granulators with forced feeding and washing system technologies that efficiently and gently process the PET to minimize material loss due to fines formation and thus maximize yield.
The preprocessing is followed by conveying and feeding into the ZSK recycling twin screw extruder. There, the PET regrind is gently melted, intensively dispersed, and processed into a homogeneous mass.
The ZSK’s twin screw technology efficiently transfers the energy into the melt. With the twin screw extruder’s high 18 Nm/cm³ torque, the PET’s residence time in the extruder is short.
Processing takes place at low temperatures, polymer chain degradation is minimal, resulting high product quality. Volatile components such as monomers, oligomers and water are removed from the melt and purged.
Following discharge from the ZSK recycling extruder, the still-warm material stream is transferred via a gear pump to an underwater granulator and an SSP reactor, where it is then condensed and decontaminated.
