Keeping up with high-quality recycled content

The fact that the production of recycled plastic content cannot adequately meet demand is creating major challenges for the industry. Adopting the latest technological advances in deburring helps close the gap between supply and demand, giving recyclers a competitive edge in efficiency and profitability.

The plastics industry in transition is facing many challenges. The most important of these is the provision of high quality secondary raw materials in sufficient volumes to meet the ever-increasing demand. In recent years, plastic production rates have experienced an unprecedented increase. According to Plastics Europe data, global plastics production reached 390.7* million metric tons in 2021, of which 352.3 MT was unprocessed (90.2%) and only 32.5 MT (8.3%) was post-consumption. It consists of recycled plastics. When the distribution of total plastic production by types is examined in more detail, it is seen that polyolefins constitute the majority with production rates of approximately 180.5 million tons. Recycling rates and access to high-quality recycled materials remain low, although market plastic production is high and further increases are expected. Unlocking the potential of existing solutions becomes even more important as regulatory and recycled content targets become increasingly stringent and time-sensitive.

Looking at the current state of recycling, waste management infrastructures, from collection to sorting to recycling, are more mature in many countries around the world, but current capacities are still not keeping up with the ever-increasing demand for recycled resin. More investment is needed to create solutions at scale to produce the required volumes and attributes. In this case, some deadlocks can be overcome with sensor-based deburring solutions. 
Deburring as part of the recycling process reduces both the quality and volume variance for polyolefins (PO), polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and a growing number of other applications.
Using the latest deburring technology, recycling facilities can capture more material types, maximize efficiency and operate profitably.

Quantum leap in quality of recyclable material

Deburring is an important step in plastic recycling. It enables the creation of high purity mono fractions in a single material type and/or colour, making it the last purification step before extrusion of target fractions. Therefore, as an indispensable process of recycling, it directly affects the final quality and yield of the recovered materials.

Although deburring machines have been integrated into many bottle recycling processes around the world to date, they have much more potential. They can also be used for processing mixed plastic waste, releasing new streams of existing raw materials and improving recycling quality. Often, in the absence of advanced deburring solutions, the end product is a mixture of different polymer types and in some cases multiple colours. This fraction, which contains several different product types, remains low in quality and can only be used for low-end applications where demand and value are marginal. On the other hand, demand for superior secondary raw materials is growing rapidly, driven by challenging recycled content targets as well as the improvement of individual sustainability documents. With advanced deburring, recyclers can easily improve product quality and create new revenue streams.

High volumes of superior raw materials at your fingertips

A plastics recycling plant can process more than 100,000 MT of polymer flakes per year, depending on market demand and material availability. Adaptation is the key to maintaining profitability due to the recent shortage of materials. Waste flows and market demands are actually quite dynamic.

If the market supply of recyclable polymers is limited but demand is high, plant operators often have no choice but to turn to dirtier post-consumer waste to meet market demands.

Exceptional purity requirements continue regardless of the volume to be processed and the type of recyclable raw material, forcing recyclers to achieve higher grades from increasingly contaminated sources.

Compared to other processing machines, deburring machines are a solution to overcome raw material inconsistency. Compact in size, these machines have proven to be a solid investment for both small and large operations, with ease of installation and flexibility of use. Advanced deburring solutions can handle varying levels of contamination without compromising recovery and purity levels. Equipped with advanced technologies that are an essential part of the recycling process, they help turn low-quality input material into pure burrs that meet even the most stringent quality requirements. Thus, they enable recycling plants to access a material that could not be recovered before and to extract maximum value from existing fractions.

A good example of creating new revenue streams is the extraction of polyolefins. The market presence of PO, which has the largest share in global plastics production, is huge and offers a lot of potential as the industry strives to use more recycled PO in the production of high quality products. However, upgrading the quality of polyolefins presents many challenges. PET bales processed in a recycling plant are mostly composed of a single target material (PET), while PO bales are seen as a mixture of polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) bivalent materials. When the input material is PO, it is difficult to estimate the share of each material type, and it can vary in each bale. One bale can be a 50/50 mix of PE and PP, and the next bale can be a 70/30 mix.

Regardless of the input composition, both PE and PP burrs need to be accurately identified and separated to form high purity fractions for recycling.

Until advanced deburring and purification methods were introduced, the infrastructure did not have the technology to cost-effectively separate PP from PE.

Less sophisticated deburring machines were often limited to PET recycling plants, as they could only purify one type of material and remove small amounts of contaminants. Also, higher volumes were difficult or impossible to produce. For example, if a recycling facility uses a less advanced deburring machine (not considering other contaminants) to process a PO bale of 60% HDPE and 40% PP, if the size of the material is large enough to allow accurate separation of PE and PP It needs to be sorted by tape separators before shredding. As a result, shredding, washing and deburring have to be done in parallel on two different lines, increasing costs significantly. Recycling facilities prefer to process batches of material in a single line in order to operate more profitably. The downside to this approach can be a reduction in overall efficiency. In addition, the cost continues to increase due to extensive material handling operations such as rebaling, storage and labor. These are some of the main challenges preventing PO from upgrading to higher quality recycled products.

Modern sensor-based deburring machines offer game-changing technology for the industry in the scenario described above. In addition to being able to detect and accurately extract polyolefins by polymer type, they can also produce multiple fractions at the same time by separating different colors. With the integration of the most advanced deburring technologies in a recycling plant, materials can be shredded and washed in a single line before entering the deburring process. This eliminates the need for multi-line or batch processing. Adopting these solutions enables recyclers to access large volumes of post-consumption material to obtain high-purity rPE and rPP fractions.