PVC automatic filter technology breakthrough

The topic of plastic recycling has been widely discussed in recent years. How to process more types of waste with different types and to increase the percentage of the r-pellets usage to stimulate the circular economy, has became a big challenge to the recyclers. 

 

PVC is a particular material type; it is very sensitive to degradation and it is corrosive, and it can damage many machines components even in the short term. For this reason, only specified extruders can be applied to PVC recycling. Generally, extruders suppliers concentrate their production on this material only and they specialize their process to recycle PVC. Fimic’s filtration technology is now applicable also to soft & rigid PVC recycling. This is actually a breakthrough as until now no continuous scraping technology could be applied to constantly recycle PVC waste.

 

 

The only option all PVC recycling companies had in terms of filtration was either a slide plate screen changer or a continuous mesh changer, but no technology using continuous scraping could be applied. PVC is a very sensitive material and easy degrades in case of higher residence time into the melt filtration process. FIMIC’s technology is totally applicable without any degradation taking place during the melt filtration phase.

 

In Germany, FIMIC installed a melt filter for soft and rigid PVC recycling. The customer wants to improve three particular conditions: filtration, output, and automation to reduce the time that operators dedicated at melt filtration step.

 

First result: the FIMIC RAS-PVC melt filter has been applied to recycling of garden hoses soft-PVC waste, applying a 150 micron laser filtration (replacing the 400 micron mesh filtration, installed on the Customer previous filtration system).

 

 

Second result: the output has been increased up to 450-500 kg/h on a RAS400-PVC, replacing the screen after 4 days, instead of every 15 minutes like before. 

 

Obviously the operator can now dedicate his time mainly on production management instead of replacing the screen several times per hour. Sometimes, the customer is also reprocessing hard-PVC windows profiles. In this case the filtration required is 300 micron.

 

FIMIC is now testing more different types of material, hoping to provide the filter to process more types of wastes. Recycling never stops!