Austrian beverage producer Steinrieser and the newly founded Austrian-Croatian beverage producer KIS pica d.o.o. have joined forces to set up a PET recycling plant in the Donja Dubrava region of Croatia for bottle-to-bottle recycling.
The Rekis PET recycling plant produces up to 18,000 tonnes of rPET pellets per year. The bottles are collected through the deposit system in Croatia, as well as via municipal collection points. In addition, Rekis sources collected plastic bottles from Austria, Slovenia, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.
The delivered material is pressed into bales, separated, and forwarded via an eddy current separator for separation from aluminium cans. A multi-stage sorting process follows for obtaining food-grade PET material, using Sesotec technology.
In a first step, the bottles pass through the Varisort+ multisensor sorting system. PET plastic bottles and clear bottles are sent to the next sorting stage, whereas unwanted plastic bottles are removed alongside other unwelcome materials. In a next phase, the material is examined for foreign materials to ensure the required grade purity. The Varisort sorting systems are equipped with Sesotec Flash technology, which detects can detect bottles with special colours like silver, opaque, TiO2 coloured, as well as bottles with a very low colour saturation. This leads to a significant improvement in the quantity of good material and to increased food-safe material. After a second sorting process of the originally rejected material, a manual quality control is finally carried out. The final material stream is scanned for metal before it enters the granulator for shredding into flakes.
“The Sesotec multisensor sorting systems are the heart of our plant,” said REKIS plant manager Filip Hozjan. “Only reliable and, above all, precise sorting enables us to obtain high-quality, colour, and grade-pure rPET that can be further processed into food-grade rPET pellets. These high-purity flakes are used by beverage producers as starting material for the production of new bottles. The cycle is closed.”
At last month’s Fakuma, Sesotec spoke with Sustainable Plastics about its newly launched sorting platform, Pre-Sort. The machine is designed to give users full control over the quality and purity of input material, minimising dependency on external suppliers, combining the Varisort sorter with a top of the line dedusting system and a mobile platform.
Original Article Published On
sustainableplastics.com
