PET Bottle Flakes Recycling Line

This waste recycling line for PET bottles mainly consists of:

Normally the PET bottles for drink water or Coca-cola to be recycled are compressed to save space. So this conveyor sends the bottle brick into the brick breaker/loosener.

It’s also called bale breaker or simply debaler, used to loosen the packed bottle bricks or film bricks. It has a huge enough storage to contain 6-7 tons of materials and to continuously feed the waste recycling line for several hours.

A trommel looks like a filtering tunnel. The center of trommel is a large cylindrical meshed tunnel rotating at 6-10rpm. The diameter of holes on its wall is smaller than PET bottle so smaller pieces of impurities or contaminants such as stones, clays and glasses will fall down. To push the PET bottles moving ahead, a tilting angle is designed.  while the bottles will be conveyed to the next stage. This equipment is very useful and is commonly applicable in municipal waste treatment system called Material Recovery Facilities.

A standard trommel provided by ILUCKU measures 2000mm (6.6ft) in diameter and 1200mm (47in) in length. A manual brush is equipped to clean the screen mesh. We have optionally 2 or 4 driving wheels and VF (variable frequency) synchronized control. Customization based on your specifications is also available.

It is used to detach the label and tag adhered to the bottle. It’s like unskinning the bottle. The tags are often made of plastics such as PE, PVC other than PET. Meanwhile some other light materials such as paper will also be sorted out. This means removing these labels and tags will increase the quality of PET flakes.

There will come bottles different from PET. Those PE bottles or PP bottles should be taken out. We recommend Tomra Autosorter to sort out the bottles from PE, PP or other polymers we decline.

There’s still something that is hard to be coped with by a plastic equipment such as an alien stuff inside a bottle. So a real human being is good solution to inspect the situation which any machine is unable to achieve.

A granulator or a crusher will cut the bottle into small pieces with a set of rotary blades and fixed blades. It’s widely used in recycling industry. More details can be found here.

Different recyled plastics has its own density in comparison with water. PET bottle flakes has a bigger density than water, so they will sink to the bottom of the floating tank. While other lighter wastes such as bottle labels and bottle caps  float on the surface of tank and can be sorted out easily.

Similarly, when we’re recycling PE films, we also use this floating washer to get rid of PET and other heavy stuff like stone and metal. In this sense, it works more like a separator than a washer.

More details of this floating separator can be found here.

Hot washer washing is a crucial step in drink bottle recycling process. Detergent or cleanser will be used to remove the organic contaminants together with the glue. Glue is widely used in packaging industry which sticks the label to the bottle.

Detergent or cleanser used will affect not only the quality of final product, but also the treatment of water. We recommend using eco-friendly detergents to protect our environment. We have some good sources of detergent supplying. If you are interested, please use the form at your right-handed side (desktop) or at the bottom (mobile) to contact us.

The paddles mounted on the rotor spin at a higher speed than 1000rpm. This generates much friction between the paddles and waste bottle flakes. Besides, the friction force among the bottle flakes themselves also works like the cleaning movement when washing our hands. So with the hot softening process in the previous hot washer, the “persistent” contaminants will be washed off.

This step is to further remove the contaminants from the previous friction washer. After this serial floating seperation, the bottle flakes become quite clean.

The water extractor is an efficient and energy-saving drying equipment. It takes away water from the material flow by centrifugal. It has a unique capability to reduce water content of the recycled to a very low level.

This extractor is very similar to the friction washer, both of which have a rotor in the center and the rotors are mounted with many tilted paddles. A mesh screen encircles the rotor. An outer casing protects the whole unit.

Dirty contaminants are fed into a vertical hopper. The fast-rotating rotor throws the recycled material at 1000rpm. Water is spun away through the screen meshes and is collected for circulating. The raw material will then get dried and go to the next handling. Generally speaking, the water content will decrease to 20-30% after this water extractor.

Hot air takes away the moisture remaining from the dewatering process. The accordion design extends the drying time and saves the space. The waste plastics is carried by the hot air and the water residue is separated and taken out. The water content after this cyclone dryer can be as low as 3%.

The recycled cola bottle flake is quite pure and clean now. In this section any light bottle label/tag, paper, film will be sorted out again. There’s also a dust collector to gather the dirt and dust. This unit helps keep the workshop clean and healthy.

Other suppliers may recommend placing this section after the granulator. It depends on the raw material we want to recycle. In our production flow, most of light stuff is sorted out during the floating separators. After washing there will be less dust and the sorted-out stuff like PE film is preliminaryily cleaned as well.

The dried clean bottle flakes is stored in this silo. We can discharge it to a bag or to a screw conveyor for the next process, say extrusion.