Beijing INCOM Resources Recovery Co. Ltd has signed a co-operation agreement with Germany-based OHL Engineering GmbH for the supply of PET bottle-to-bottle recycling equipment.

According to OHL's Managing Director Stefan Behnke, INCOM currently operates China’s only bottle-to-bottle recycling facility; this is capable of reprocessing 110 million pounds of PET bottles and churning out 44 million pounds of food-grade pellets annually. The Beijing-based company plans to build five more bottle-to-bottle plants in five undisclosed Chinese provinces over the next four years. OHL will be supplying equipment for these plants, each of which will have an annual capacity of 66 million pounds of food-grade resin.

According to the Plasticker news service, this is the first time that OHL - a subsidiary of Schoeller Holding GmbH - has supplied recycling equipment into China. Mr Behnke says of the company’s recycling process: 'Bottles are ground to flakes in a complex washing process and are washed in various stages. Screw tops, labels and glue are removed as well as any left-over of the drink and dirt. Afterwards, the flakes are melted down and used to process chips. Finally, the chips are treated for several hours in a so-called tumble dryer. This latter process improves the mechanical characteristics and also decontaminates the chips.’

He adds: ‘The core of the unit is the 'tumble reactor' , supplied by our sister company OHL Technologies. At the end of the whole process, the chips have the same characteristics as virgin PET.’ According to Mr Behnke, the reprocessed resin is slightly cheaper than virgin material. The recycling process requires half of the energy and the water used in the production of virgin material.

China recycles 75% of its domestic post-consumer bottles and also imports large amounts of PET scrap from overseas. Most of the recycled material ends up as polyester fibre for the textiles industry.

Acknowledgement

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