PETplanet Insider Vol. 24 No. 12/23 www.petpla.net 33 TRADE SHOW REVIEW Interview with Daniel Gneuss, President of Gneuss USA PETplanet: Mr Gneuss, we heard a great deal about bottle flakes to fibres at your event. Is this a future market, especially since the PET bottle industry is desperately seeking flakes? Daniel Gneuss: I think this market is important, especially in America, where polyester carpets mean a huge demand for fibres. But I also think that it is more and more difficult for fibre manufacturers to get bottle flakes, and in the future, most bottle flakes will go back into bottles. PETplanet: Hopefully using your systems? Daniel Gneuss: We’ve shown that our Multi Rotation Extrusion System (MRS) produces a brilliantly consistent quality for bottle-to-bottle recycling. But I worry that in the future conventional stand-alone bottle-to-bottle facilities will have a hard time competing with large scale approaches from resin producers. Blending post-consumer bottle flakes back into a melt stream and creating new resin from 25 or 30% rPET. At today’s recycling rate this is a sensible approach which can also easily scaled up and down depending on the availability of PCR. Gneuss has delivered multiple lines for such production lines and we see growing interest in this technology. PETplanet: Today, you presented cap recycling. Daniel Gneuss: Yes, I think there’s still plenty for recyclers to work on in the future besides PET bottle-to-bottle recycling. The cap weighs around 5 to 10% of the bottle weight, and today this doesn’t feed back into the closed loop. With the system presented here, we’re creating granulate for new drinks caps. PETplanet: Thank you so much Mr Gneuss. Daniel Gneuss, President of Gneuss USA, showing cap flakes in front of the new MRSpure, which will process them into recycled HDPE for new caps.
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