Bepex Installs Plastic Bottle Recycling System in Vietnam

Bepex International, Minneapolis, a provider of equipment for the food, chemical, mineral and polymer industries, has signed an agreement with Vietnam-based Thanh Tai Gas Co. to custom design, fabricate and deliver a BePET plastic bottle recycling system to the company. The system will allow Thanh Tai Gas to recycle up to 1.5 billion PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles per year. Bepex says the system will be the first of its type in South East Asia.

“BePET is designed to conduct flake-to-flake recycling for bottle-to-bottle (BtB) applications, while still allowing extreme flexibility to produce product suitable for other applications such as fiber or carpet,” says Truong Hieu, owner, Thanh Tai Gas Co. “In selecting BePET for our process needs, we also were impressed with the highly customized solution the Bepex engineering teamwas able to provide to us for our unique situation here in Vietnam.”

Ralph Imholte, president and CEO of Bepex International, says, “BePET cost-effectively recycles PET plastic flake while simultaneously controlling final product quality. Our new system can help the industry move toward greater sustainability by making the resulting recycled PET flake more cost effective and usable in more ways than other current PET recycling systems offer.”

The system allows the processing plant operator to control decontamination of the plastic and product intrinsic viscosity (IV) –- a measure of the strength of the plastic polymer, which determines how the resulting plastic can be used –- at the same time and in solid form. Different IV plastic can be used for different applications.

The first line in the system for Thanh Tai will be installed and fully operational by January 2012, after which a second parallel line will be installed to expand capacity to produce different IV plastics for a variety of applications, especially for the food packing industry.