PETpla.net Insider 09 / 2019

MATERIALS / RECYCLING PET planet Insider Vol. 19 No. 09/19 www.petpla.net 47 recycling experts in Germany to the local people in the US and even the directors. We’ve gotten to know the Krones family very well and we con- sider them friends.” Krones served as one of the general contractors, integrating the front end for sorting and shredding the post-consumer PET containers, its own cleaning and decontamination modules, and all pneumatic mate- rial conveyance. The line processes approximately 6,600 pounds of PET per hour. “Before we decided on Krones, we looked at some projects around the world that were already using Krones equipment. We were quite impressed by how mechani- cally sound the equipment was and how little manual labour was involved,” says Ross. Daviduk adds: “We believe that Krones offered the most comprehensive and the best recycling system in the world. And we fully expect Krones to live up to that.” Bob Daviduk (l.) and Joe Ross, the two founders of rPlanet Earth Krones as one of the general contractors Of course, a plant of this size needs a lot of space. rPlanet Earth found that space in Vernon, Califor- nia, about five miles southeast of Downtown Los Angeles. Vernon is an industrial city with its own power com- pany, which provides competitively priced electricity. The facility sits on a 657,000 square-foot property (about 15 acres) that houses a logistics yard for truck traffic, a covered collection area for PET plastic bale receiving and storage, and the 302,000 square- foot plant at the heart of it all. The plant itself consists of three different sections:  In the front end, the feedstock is debaled and sorted using multiple technologies. When the sorting is complete and only PET plastic containers remain, they are then shredded.  The resulting flake enters a Meta- Pure W wash line, which removes any remaining contaminants and foreign matter and cleans the flakes in several stages. Another sorter at the end of the wash line ensures that only PET flakes move on to the next processing stage.  In the MetaPure S decontamina- tion reactor, the flake is heated to around 390 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius) – depending on the target application – under a vacuum. Flake that has passed through this step is safe and approved for direct food contact packaging. The rPET flake contin- ues right on to one of the plant’s plastics processing lines, where it is converted into preforms or extruded sheet. The latter is also used as the basis for producing thermoformed containers downstream. This closed loop is both extremely compact and highly complex and is ultimately what sets rPlanet Earth apart. “The setup was important for us for a couple of reasons. One is because, as far as we know, it gives us the lowest carbon footprint for packaging worldwide,” explains Bob Daviduk. “Another is that it just made sense for us to have everything under a single roof because it’s a more effi- cient process. At rPlanet Earth, our goal is to have the lightest possible impact on the environment, on our planet Earth.” Skipping the pellets The PET material recycled in rPlanet Earth’s new plant goes directly into the production of preforms, sheet, and thermoformed containers. The decision to produce precisely these three products was based on logical criteria: the primary use for recycled PET is bottle production. In the US alone, the market for PET beverage and food bottle production is some 6 billion pounds a year. For that reason, preforms make up around 35 per cent of the rPlanet Earth plant’s output. Thermoformed containers make up around 50 percent. Sheet extrusion makes up about 15 per cent of the product mix. rPlanet Earth can pro- duce all three packaging types with up to 100 per cent recycled content, depending on customer specifications. www.krones.com Float-sink tank in the washing module MetaPure W