The importance of PET recycling sorting

Amcor Packaging Corporation selected Sortex's sorting equipment as an important part of its French PET recycling plant. The high-tech Sortex Z3 sorter is Amcor's European business, especially for PET recycling and reprocessing. A very important role.

Amcor has 70 factories all over the world and produces more than 32 billion PET containers annually. These PET containers are widely used in beverages such as carbonated drinks, drinking water, fruit juices, sports drinks, milk, beer and many more. Spirits. With the growing emphasis on environmental protection throughout the world, Amcor has also realized and paid great attention to the issue of PET recycling.

Predictably, by the year 2010, Europe will produce about one million tons of PET recyclables each year due to different consumption. Take Britain as an example. More than 700 million PET bottles were recycled and processed in the UK last year alone. For fiber fillers, clothing, tray belts, blankets or other containers. From this point of view, the considerable amount of raw materials produced from recycled PET can not only meet the needs of the manufacturing sector, but also ease the pressure on the shortage of raw materials in the UK.

Amcor's European factory places great emphasis on the recycling of PET. Every year, a large number of tests are conducted to develop the production line and improve the quality of recycled PET products. The contents contained in the recycling and recycling section start from the bottle that has been discarded until new raw materials are processed and new materials are used to produce other useful products.

After a large number of discarded PET bottles enter the recycling process, they must undergo sorting, cleaning, crushing, etc. to become recycled PET bottles before they can be processed into new PET containers. For all processing steps, it is particularly important to clean and reject unrelated bottles, otherwise it will affect the quality of recycled materials; similarly, sorting PET chips based on color, shape, transparency, weight, etc. is also very important. .

When PET bottles are recycled and processed, they first need to be cleaned and then squeezed into small particles (so-called bottle tablets). At this point, the debris is purified and sorted. If it is dust, it can be removed by magnetic sorting. If it is aluminum impurities, it cannot be removed by this method, and even blocking the screening system. Therefore, daily maintenance and cleaning of filters are very necessary.

After three months of testing, Amcor eventually chose Sortex's equipment. The Sortex Z3 sorter has a high production line capacity. After the cleaning cycle, the sorter can sort 1.5 tons of material per hour according to color and effectively remove any impurities such as wood, metal or other irrelevant impurities, and The final sorting is colorless, green and blue. So far, the Sortex sorter's performance is very good. For every one million PET particles sorted, there is less than 20 chances of mistakes.

After using the Sortex Z3 sorter, Amcor saves a lot of production costs, such as maintenance costs and energy consumption; the final product qualification rate is also greatly increased, reducing the impact of impurities such as wood, aluminum and rubber in extrusion processing.

As Frederic Blanchard, Amcor's PET recycling department manager, said, "The Sortex sorter has brought new life to our production line. As a company that attaches great importance to environmental issues, we have always paid close attention to the environmental protection of the production process and the final product. We are now using it. The Sortex sorter, for our recycling processing plant, brings benefits and benefits to society that we are proud of and introduce.”

Amcor Corporation

Source: Modern Packaging