Herbold Meckesheim, based in Meckesheim, Germany, has supplied an advanced plastic film recycling installation to Rodepa Plastics of the Netherlands. This plant can cope with highly contaminated film as well as with extremely thin-walled film. Operational since beginning of this year, it produces high-quality regrind used for manufacture of thin films employed, for example, for production of bin liners, protective sheets and construction foils. There is no requirement to add virgin plastic material. 

 

The raw feed material consists of a mix of several different plastics. A major challenge here is the separation of unwanted plastics. In order to achieve this task, Herbold in the field of wet film recycling has opted for hydrocyclone separation technology, allowing heavier plastic components to be separated from the polyolefin.

 

Deposits of organic substances, a frequent feature of film from household waste, are removed by washing. With different film waste obviously a different demand is put on the individual recycling steps. Such film is highly contaminated, with the degree of contamination sometimes attaining almost 50%. This means that the quantity of different contaminations corresponds to the quantity of films in the film washing plant. In order to separate this type of contamination from film, in the washing plant as early as the pre-size reduction step, a wet shredder especially designed for this purpose is used by Rodepa Plastics. www.herbold.com 

 

 

Herbold hydrocyclone and dryer, with pre-washing unit pictured in the background; plastic waste (pictured below) from which high-grade recyclate is produced