PETpla.net Insider 03 / 2017

MATERIALS / RECYCLING PET planet Insider Vol. 18 No. 03/17 www.petpla.net 8 Bottle-to-bottle flakes with FDA approval The recycling company Invema commissioned a plant for the recycling of PET bottles in Honduras at the end of 2016 in order to produce bottle-to-bottle quality with Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) approval. In the first expansion stage the plant is processing 2,000t bottles per month. bold Meckesheim produced, installed and commissioned the plant. After regranulation the end product is sold to the local Coca Cola bottle producer. A second expansion step is in preparation. Its aim is to produce thermoforming PET film suitable for use in foodstuffs. Honduras already has a recycling rate of 84%, neverthe- less, bottles have to be imported in order to use the plant to full capacity. The owner of Invema, George Gatlin, states in an interview: “Coca Cola is enthusiastic about the quality of the regranulate that we produce.” www.invemagroup.com www.herbold.com In Honduras the collection rate of PET bottles amounts to 84%. 2,000t PET bottles per month are treated with the plant technology from Herbold Meckesheim. After sorting, the PET bottles are size reduced in two Herbold granula- tors with a capacity of 1,800kg/h. Secondary cleaning of the PO fraction during the hydrocyclone separation step from Herbold Meckesheim. Invema Group was founded 1994 with the idea of buying densifying alu- minium beverage cans for recycling. Today Invema has 370 employees in Honduras and further 100 in El Salva- dor. They see to the collection, recep- tion, sorting and treatment of plastic bottles. In a second step a plant was installed for treating the polyolefine fraction from the recycling process, i.e. the caps and labels of the bottles. Part of the energy needed for the recycling plants is produced on site: with 3,640 solar panels on the roofs of the plant location they are generating 1MW electrical power. In a multi-stage process, the bot- tles are pre-sorted, size-reduced, washed cold and hot and after drying forwarded to a flake sorting step. The German machine manufacturer Her-