PETpla.net Insider 06 / 2016

MATERIAL / RECYCLING 24 PET planet insider Vol. 17 No. 06/16 www.petpla.net Successful premiere of PET briquettes based on an article of by Harry Weiland, freelance journalist RECYCLING S P E C I A L At the large counting centre for disposable packaging made from PET, aluminium and tin there was a positive sum- mary regarding the first new HSM briquetting press. Despite some difficulties that had had to be overcome along the way. After the HSM BRP 4810 had been set up for testing in the counting centre in Oberhausen, Germany, the employ- ees would only have used the new machine, although the old one could have been used in parallel, reported Uwe Lauf, the operations manager in the Repasack counting centre in Oberhausen. The new press works twice as fast as its predecessor and it compresses with much more power. “This machine works very well and very reliably”, concludes the operations manager after nine months, taking stock of the performance of the HSM press for PET bottles and cans for the first time. The new machine in Oberhausen also gave the employees a few surprises: the very first roll-off container, filled with briquettes from the new HSM machine, was too heavy. The suc- cessful outcome of the machine’s premiere in Oberhausen was by no means guaranteed: when, in Septem- ber 2014, the briquetting press was set up in the counting centre in the Ruhr, this was the first time this type of machine had been used for the difficult task of pressing disposable packaging. HSM has a long history of manufacturing channel baling presses for the recycling industry, but for the disposal and compression of PET and tin needed by Repasack, baling is out of the question. So HSM developed the first briquetting press for heavy- duty work in a counting house in close cooperation with the recycling experts from Repasack in Oberhausen. The advantage of briquettes: they are small and heavy and therefore fill transporters to their optimum load capacity. And they do not need strap- ping materials such as wire. The demand for a press for the drinks industry is therefore high: PET is a very abrasive substance, which can wear machines down badly. Thicker, premium quality types of sheet metal and steel are therefore a must-have - which is why the develop- ers were delighted that HSM installs particularly wear-resistant steels as standard. PET can, moreover, be rather stubborn: an additional guide plate must be installed, because PET bottles manage to force themselves again and again between the plates and then pop up in places where they don’t belong. This must not happen, because pressing bottles and cans properly is practically a legal obliga- tion for the machine, since dispos- able packaging is only regarded as disposed when it has been properly destroyed. A quality criterion, for which the counting centre must be certified once a year by the German Deposit Association. Unique threefold compression produces a PET briquette den- sity of up to 400kg/m³