Daly Plastics recovers agricultural and packaging film

Daly Plastics, Caroda Polymer Recovery’s subsidiary, operates four granulation lines in Zutphen, making it one of the largest plastics scrap processing companies in the Netherlands. Daly Plastics aims to produce regranulates from recycled agricultural and packaging films of the same quality as virgin material. The company relies on Lindner Recyclingtech, headquartered in Austria, for innovative recycling solutions.

Recognizing the potential of the recovered film market early on, Peter Daalder founded Daly Plastics in 1985 at age 16, with a focus on plastic scrap collection and processing. In 2013, the business expanded to plastics recycling with the recovery facility for agricultural and packaging films.

Agricultural film is collected from more than 2,500 farmers in the Benelux countries and northern Germany. Approximately 64,000 metric tons of used film is recycled and processed into reusable polyethylene per year at the site. Daly Plastics uses Lindner’s Jupiter 2200 and Micromat 2000 shredders to produce ideal sized pellets.

Material is weighed, presorted using grapples and fed onto a conveyor belt for processing. A Jupiter located outside the sorting hall shreds the agricultural film, so the drum screen properly filters stones and soil out of the material.

“Agricultural film often contains foreign material, such as lumps of soil or stones,” Daalder says. “Even large foreign matter in the feed material doesn’t make any difference to Jupiter. That’s one of the main reasons why we decided to buy Lindner shredders.”

Another Jupiter 2200 primary shredder is installed inside the hall and shreds postconsumer film to the size of A4 paper.

“This size is ideal for optical sorting processes,” Daalder says. “It means the sensors can optimally distinguish LDPE from other PE and PP plastic types and separate it from the material stream. The Jupiter produces the perfect output, with the perfect cut for subsequent automatic NIR (near-infrared) sorting.”

Lindner says the Jupiter features low energy consumption, as well as a safety clutch that prevents machine damage from foreign parts, such as metal parts or stones that enter the machine despite pre-sorting.

“The machine immediately jams and all our employees have to do is open the hydraulic maintenance door,” Daalder explains. “That’s very easy since the material that’s still present in the cutting chamber is pushed upward. Then you simply let the cutting system run back a little, remove the foreign material and close the maintenance door. All in all, that only takes a few minutes.”

Next door, the recycling film flakes process comprises of fine shredding, dry cleaning, extrusion and granulate bagging. Each of the four lines processes one color of film and is equipped with a Lindner Micromat 2000, which produces 50-millimeter particles.

“The machine fulfills two important functions in the line,” Daalder says. “It reduces the feed material to exactly the optimum particle size needed for the extruder and simultaneously doses the material.”

For dry cleaning, Linder’s washTech is used to remove leftover dirt and mineral buildup, as well as reduce the moisture present in the film.

Daly Plastics checks the quality of the granulates in the laboratory and produces rubbish bags for inspection. The clean film flakes are granulated and transported to the extruder. The extruded, thread-like plastic strands are then cooled and cut to pellets. The end-product is filled into big bags, ready for dispatch or stored in silos for transport to the customer by tanker.

The grey, black and brown granulate pellets are used to produce new tear-resistant film, such as waste collection bags.

“The degree of purity determines the quality of the end-product,” Daalder says. “The industry needs clean and homogeneous granulates to turn it back into film.”