Plastics recycling facility in England installs Amut system

The Recycling Division of Italy-based Amut, a manufacturer of plastics washing plants, has partnered with Amut EcoTech, which provides sorting and separation technology, to supply a recycling plant in England with a turnkey mixed plastics sorting plant and an HDPE (high-density polyethylene) washing plant.

The plant offers a range of capabilities from sorting mixed plastics to the delivery of flakes of a quality level suitable for use in extrusion, injection or thermoforming processes, the company says.

The plant reclaims polyolefin thermoplastics scrap from urban and industrial sources and transforms into flakes with an output of 10 tons per hour.

The plant is fed with bales of mixed plastics. The bales are loaded by forklift onto the weighing-system-equipped extracting chain conveyor installed in a pit. They are then conveyed to the bale breaker that uses a drum equipped with fixed teeth to separate the bales. The material is then conveyed to a presort picking cabin, where employees remove bulky materials, before being conveyed to the rotary trommel, where the separation occurs by size: material smaller than 30 millimeters (1.18 inches); material sized from 30 to 260 millimeters (1.18 to 10.24 inches); and oversize materials larger than 260 millimeters (10.24 inches).

The midrange material is conveyed to a ballistic separator, which sorts three-dimensional material from two-dimensional material. The three-dimensional material is then sorted using optics.

After the NIR (near-infrared) optical reader, material is transported to QC (quality control) stations. The three-dimensional material also passes through a demetallization line, consisting of an overband magnetic separator and eddy current separator. Recovered ferrous and nonferrous materials are weighed and discharged into hook-lift containers.

The washing line features a friction washer that the company says is noiseless. The water used for the friction washer is filtered and then used again for the process. The rinsing cycle uses two troughs in series and helps to separate light pollutants (paper, nonpolyolefin thermoplastics, etc.). The material is introduced in the bottom of the rinsing troughs to improve efficiency, Amut says.

The equipment has been designed to assure both separation and complete cleaning of thermoplastic material from all the pollutants having specific weight higher than the thermoplastics, the company says. Possible residuals not extracted in the washing section are filtered during the granulation process.