Extrusion International 6-2022

47 Extrusion International 6/2022 Mixed Plastics – Separation Solution Already in Industrial Use for Decades When recycling electronic scrap, automobiles and other consumer goods, the focus is usually on recovering the valuable metal fraction. Ferrous and especially non ferrous metals are the “object of desire” and are almost completely recovered from the waste streams by modern processing plants. What usually remains however, in addition to a certain proportion of non-recyclable residual materials and light fractions, is a mixed plastic fraction. Plastic mixtures that consist of many different plastics are usually worthless. Only clean and pure fractions can be reused for high-grade new products. Typical composition of mixed plastics Mixed plastics often remain after valuable metal fractions have been separated. The volume share of plas- tics in electronic scrap, amounts for example to 15% of the total volume. In relation to the total quantity of elec- tronic scrap materials recycled in Eu- rope, this already amounts to several 100,000 tonnes per year. Due to the mechanical processing technologies used for electronic scrap, plastic fractions are then very often in- terspersedwith all kinds of undesirable foreign materials such as wood, glass, rubber, residual metals and others. The largest problem with these mixed plastics is therefore the com- plexity and composition as well as the impurities, which hamper the process- ing of such fractions. Intensive evalu- ation has shown that, for example, more than 60 different plastics are found in electronic scrap, which can be more or less contaminated with ad- ditives, fillers, flame retardants, etc. A processing technology to achieve clean plastics must therefore be able to deal not only with the undesirable "Thanks to the PURE LOOP tech- nology, it is now possible to return the high-quality recyclates directly to production. It makes sense in terms of cost effectiveness and it is an impor- tant step for us within the company in view of the circular economy that the industry is striving for," explains Jürgen Gruber. Currently, production waste from the sister site in France is being repelletised for production, while waste from the subsidiary in the Netherlands is being processed at the PURE LOOP plant in Linz for test purposes. "We produce many other special plastics in addition to this PP nonwoven. If we achieve the same high quality of recycled pellets, then we are open to using the PURE LOOP technology for other materials as well," says Jürgen Gruber. PureLoop GesmbH Unterfeldstraße 3, 4052 Ansfelden, Austria www.pureloop.com TenCate Geosynthetics Austria manufactures the high-strength PP nonwoven fabric shown here. The edge trimmings and production waste are processed in an ISEC evo recycling plant to produce recyclate material