Plastic Recycyling : Lindner’s Jupiter BW Series sets new standards in film recycling

Plastics have been an essential part of our daily lives for many decades. Whether in medicine, the food sector or automotive industry, the easy processing and application abilities of polymers over other materials means that they are represented in a wide range of sectors. Packaging materials such as films, primarily made of polyethylene (LDPE, LLDPE) and polypropylene (PP), have a particularly short product life cycle and also account for a significant portion of waste generation worldwide at a total share of around 40%.

Due to the high volume of waste, there is a high demand for efficient recycling solutions for film fractions. Modular washing and drying processes specifically customised to the input materials – with and without hot wash – ensure the plastic flakes or the regranulate are optimally cleaned. Equally crucial are the upstream sorting processes that make sure that only recyclable materials pass through the washing cycle and are free from metals, non-metals and minerals. However, as important as these specially coordinated processes are, quality sorting starts with the bale opening and shredding, where the decisive parameters are output quality and a consistent particle size as well as a low proportion of fines.

Lindner is bringing to the market the latest in the Jupiter series, the Jupiter BW. It’s a shredding solution that has a shredder set-up specially tailored to film recycling and makes significant quality optimisation a reality right from the first process step – the shredding. After bale opening, the films are precisely cut to a A4/A3 size. Due to the continuous film size achieved in this way, downstream NIR systems are able to work within the optimum operating point, to detect materials in a more targeted manner and assign them to the correct material stream. ‘Thanks to the new Jupiter BW model, we have succeeded in adapting the particle size perfectly to the requirements of the NIR systems. What is particularly remarkable is that with the special shredder set-up we have successfully reduced the proportion of fines that are unusable for the recycler, and which have to be disposed of, by 44%, compared to conventional machines. We achieve this through a gently slow-running but powerful shredding operation with special control parameters,’ emphasises Stefan Scheiflinger-Ehrenwerth, Head of Product Management at Lindner Recyclingtech.

Optimally matching the individual process steps from feeding the baled film to the finished washed flake is a key quality factor. Lindner is one of the few manufacturers to offer all-in-one solutions for recycling post-consumer and post-commercial plastics, from LDPE, LLDPE, HDPE and PP to PET. The shredders specially designed for plastics recycling, the coordinated downstream sorting processes and, last but not least, the modular and individually adaptable components of the Lindner washing and drying systems guarantee optimised process steps, efficiency, high throughputs and high-quality plastic flakes.