As China re-opens in 2023, how will the plastic recycling industry take advantage of this situation? Alan Ou, Product Director of Zhejiang BoReTech Environmental Engineering Co., Ltd., believes that although the overall global economy may not be optimistic in 2023, the plastic recycling industry still has a relatively large room for development as overseas customer rebounds and related industry policies are implemented.

Global machinery is heading towards automated, environmental friendly and sustainable production. Replacing virgin materials with recycled raw materials is an inevitable trend, which is also an important means for companies to become low-carbon, environmental friendly and achieve ESG goals. Many brands in the industry have announced their targets for using recycled plastics by 2025 and 2030. In addition, the potential demand for recycled food-grade and filament-grade, high-quality recycled plastics is still very big.

“According to industry news, China is likely to update the policy of using recycled PET and PP in food-grade application packaging in few years. As far as we know, four companies have also obtained FDA certification, but currently these companies are all using equipment from Europe.” According to Ou, BoReTech hopes to conventionalize the use of recycled plastics in food-grade packaging through its own efforts.

Alan Ou, Product Director, Zhejiang BoReTech Environmental Engineering Co., Ltd.

“Our own factory in Taiwan region has achieved the recycling and cleaning of waste PET bottles and subsequently made them into food-grade granules. We also plan to actively promote the localization of extrusion granulation and solid-state thickening equipment in mainland China. We also believe that in future, if small and medium domestic and international customers have this demand, they will find their investment more economical compared with that using equipment from Europe.”

“BoReTech has always been operating in the market based on our edge in offering comprehensive overall solutions, system equipment and engineering,” said Ou.

At CHINAPLAS 2023, BoReTech is presenting its PET bottle recycling system, which is the new ES process that they put forward in 2022. Under the new ES process, recycling and washing of PET bottles will take up less space, reducing by 40% compared to standard process. It also has a greater degree of automation, not only requires less manpower for online operations, but also saves water and makes water recycling more environmentally friendly.

As each module of the equipment has integrated different functions, different standardized modules can form a production line. The PET quality of the recycled products that are produced from waste plastic is almost the same as that of standard process washing line.

The Intensive Washer for the new ES process.

Apart from this, removing heat-shrinkable labels from the PET bottle has always been a pain spot in the PET recycling industry. For this reason, BoReTech continues to develop new models that target this issue. This new model not only increases the off-label rate, but also significantly reduces the breakage rate of the bottle head. This model has also been improved so that the service life has been extended for the parts that easily wear out, and the daily replacement time of these parts has been further reduced. These improvements have shortened the downtime of the entire production line, which is conducive to improving the system uptime.

Ou believes that the international trade barriers against China have had a great impact on the company. But the release of relevant laws and regulations has brought them potential orders. “BoReTech is oriented towards a global market and currently export accounts for around 70%,” he added. “We also found that more and more countries have, through policies or regulations, mandated that plastic food packaging must use a certain percentage of recycled plastic.”

It is known that countries such as India, Vietnam, and South Korea will have such laws and regulations introduced to their markets in 2024 and 2025. These countries are the potential markets as BoReTech has obtained relatively significant orders over the past two to three years.

BoReTech’s current plastic recycling and cleaning system includes cleaning, extrusion granulation and solid-state thickening. The company has set up a project aimed at unmanned operation, and is committed to building a waste plastic recycling and cleaning factory into a first-class intelligent and environmentally friendly, green factory. It hopes that, as international travel re-opens and stabilizes, customers at home and abroad can visit the bottle-to-bottle demonstration line set up by BoReTech’s factory in Taiwan after a preliminary understanding of their bottle-to-bottle process and equipment at CHINAPLAS.

A visit will help customers clearly understand their equipment, process and technology, as well as the quality of the recycled food-grade pellets it produces, so as to gain more confidence in BoReTech.

Booth: 6F41