PETpla.net Insider 04 / 2019

MATERIALS / RECYCLING PET planet Insider Vol. 20 No. 04/19 www.petpla.net 12 Recycling Special Niedl: I can only speak about the growth numbers of PET bottle-to- bottle recycling, as this is the market that Starlinger recycling technology is involved in. The market was good until 2013 but a bit slow in 2014-2016 until it grew again in 2017. Since 2018, the market has gone through the roof all over the world; I’d say our business in this segment has quad- rupled and there is no end in sight. This development is due to changed consumer perception about recycling, but certainly recycling quotas set by individual countries further support this growth. PETplanet: There is more and more talk about what is called chemi- cal recycling. How do you rate this technology? Would that be a field where Starlinger would be involved? Niedl: Chemical recycling has been around since decades, but what we see now is a kind of renais- sance. In the past these processes have been too expensive to compete with mechanical recycling for regu- lar applications. Now there are many new initiatives on a pilot scale. Such new approaches could complement mechanical recycling for difficult recy- cling applications such as multilayer or multi-material structures, but we will have to see once they get beyond the pilot scale if such chemical recycling approaches are cost-effective for a regular scale project. www.starlinger.com Dr. Stephan Gneuss, Managing Director at Gneuss PETplanet: Founded in 1983, Gneuss was initially specialised in melt treatment for the extrusion of profiles, pipes and plates and the production of compounds. When and why was plastic recycling a topic for Gneuss? Gneuss: As a manufacturer of filtration systems for polymer melts, recycling was a big topic from the beginning. The first focus was on industrial waste recycling. A big impact on the company started, when we broadened our focus to include post-consumer recycling, particularly PET from drinking bottles, which was already available in decent quantities and qualities at that time. In general you can say that the development of the company with regard to recycling was driven by customer demand as well as by technical developments made by Gneuss, such as the recy- cling filtration system RSFgenius and the degassing extrusion system MRS. PETplanet: The PET recycling industry has been very busy for quite some time now: the new EU directive of Plastic Strategy and the commit- ments of the big brand owners (Coca Cola / Nestlé / Pepsico etc.) to use more rPET in products are lead- ing to a huge demand for rPET. One would assume that this also has a positive effect on the recycling system manufacturers - is this the case with Gneuss? Gneuss: There is a clear trend for growth in the bottle-to-bottle market segment driven by the relatively high prices achievable for rPET pellets. This is obviously a consequence of the new EU Directive of Plastic Strat- egy and the commitments of the big brand owners. However, the European bottle-to-bottle market is already quite mature. Inside the EU there are only few new players in the market. Most of the growth is taken up by the already existing big players. This situation dif- fers a lot in the rest of the world since some markets are more and some less developed in this aspect. The consequences on the sheet market and also for fibre producers are not overall positive. The use of bottle flakes is quite common in these market segments, however it is tied to the availability of bottle flakes in a suitable quantity and quality. Due to the strong demand increase by the bottle-to-bottle market this is getting more and more difficult. Also, the waste streams regarding PET bottle flakes are more and more controlled by a small number of market players. This makes access to bottle flakes increasingly difficult for small and medium sized companies with little connection to the waste market, as it is typically the case for sheet producers. We expect this to be the main limitation for the future development of the PET recycling market: accessibility to bottle flakes. This is not only a EU specific situ- ation. However, taking a global look, the situation differs very much from country to country. PETplanet: Gneuss offers a bottle- to-bottle recycling system especially for PET recycling. What are the special features of this system? Gneuss: The bottle-to-bottle market was important for us from the very beginning with regard to our filtra- tion systems. When we introduced the MRS extrusion system about 12 years ago, we were able to offer a new feature: decontamination of PET in one simple extrusion process without prior treatment of the flakes or an SSP. This system has been successfully implemented in a number of bottle-to- bottle lines in the meantime. However, the main focus lies on thermoforming sheet where food contact approval plays an equally important role. Also, the fibre industry (which is still the main processor of PET bottle flakes) plays a very important role for our business. At the last K-show we introduced our “Jump” polymer reac- tion technology which allows an IV built up in the melt phase within just a few minutes. This offers new possibili- ties for the bottle-to-bottle recycling process. Due to the limited access of many companies to PET bottle flakes with a sufficient quality (e.g. little amount of foreign polymers), we, as a technology developing company, have been focus- ing in the last few years on technical improvements. New technologies, which allow the PET processor to work with low quality recycling materials and PET waste from alternative sources (such as post-consumer thermoforming sheet packaging). In the long term, we expect better collection and sorting logistics and technologies to be able to create a larger amount of well recyclable polymers in decent qualities. But in the short and medium term we need to focus on technologies which allow the processor to produce good quality products even with low quality input materials. www.gneuss.com