Another event in the successful EREMA Discovery Day series took place at the EREMA headquarters in Ansfelden, Austria on 20 March 2015. Over 200 existing and potential customers and other guests accepted the invitation and this time took full advantage of information about trends, challenges, opportunities and efficient solutions in the field of post consumer recycling. The highlight of Discovery Day 2015 was the global premiere of the new product innovation INTAREMA® RegrindPro® for the highly efficient recycling of regrind materials.

Post consumer recycling going from strength to strength

The trend in plastics recycling is characterised on the one hand by the fact that the quality of the input material is decreasing whereas, on the other hand, the requirements for existing applications (e.g. in the production of blown film) and the demand for exactly specified raw materials from recyclate are increasing. In addition to this the quantities of heavily contaminated post consumer materials are growing and this development calls for new markets and, in particular, new, innovative end products with a high portion or consisting entirely of recyclate.

This represents ever growing challenges in terms of recycling solutions, especially in the post consumer area. Clemens Kitzberger, EREMA Business Development Manager Post Consumer Recycling, explains: "Due to the fact that packaging materials are becoming thinner all the time with the relative portion of impurities continuing to increase, plus the high residual moisture and degrees of contamination of the input material, highly efficient recycling technologies are required." Kitzberger continues: "EREMA has been adapting its technologies continuously to the requirements of the wide variety of recycling applications for more than 30 years. And, as we have also noted a rapidly growing demand for efficient solutions for the processing of thick-walled plastic materials at the current time, we have designed our latest product, the RegrindPro^® system, to meet the exact requirements in this field of application. Moreover, the product COREMA^® enables the production of exactly specified and application-oriented raw materials based on recyclate. COREMA^® brings together the benefits of recycling and compounding and interest in this technology is growing all the time. This is also the reason why we will be offering our customers access to a workbench for the production of larger test quantities as of autumn 2015."

Numerous existing and potential customers and other guests received detailed information about these latest developments in expert talks and demonstrations on INTAREMA^® and COREMA^® systems at EREMA's Discovery Day 2015.

Premiere of new product innovation INTAREMA^® RegrindPro^®

Demand for the processing of regrind materials to make high-quality recycled pellets is growing more and more, especially in the thick-walled packaging, electronics (WEEE) and automotive sectors. The thick-walled input material (HDPE, PP, ABS, PS, etc.), however, requires a specific treatment process which is designed to be able to handle mixed fractions with varying compositions, high bulk density and moisture, extremely varying contaminants through an exceptionally wide variety of impurities such as rubber, silicone and soft contaminants such as wood and paper, plus foreign polymers like PET and PA.

To offer its customers optimum solutions also in the regrind segment, EREMA presented the new product innovation INTAREMA^® RegrindPro^® at Discovery Day 2015 – a system which meets exactly these requirements for the highly efficient recycling of regrind materials. The key factors of this innovation lie above all in the extremely gentle processing and the highly efficient filtration.

The thick-walled regrind particles are warmed through perfectly in the preconditioning unit thanks to the slower turning of the patented rotor disc and a longer dwell time. This means that the material can melt in the extruder with minimum shearing forces while at the same time the impurities in the melt remain large enough to be filtered out extremely efficiently by the high-performance filter.

Additionally, through the combination of the optimised preconditioning unit with a new, particularly gentle universal screw, the new INTAREMA^® RegrindPro^® offers you a remarkably high degree of flexibility which enables multipurpose regrind processing. This allows you, for example, to process regrind despite varying viscosity, as in the case of materials such as HDPE and PP, using the same system with full output and in a gentle way.

Clemens Kitzberger continues: "The EREMA high-performance filter systems additionally ensure continuously high throughput with outstanding melt quality at the same time. With the recently enhanced EREMA Laserfilter, contaminants are removed even more quickly through the redesign of the scraper geometry and discharge system, resulting in even better filtration performance."

The result of the new INTAREMA^® RegrindPro^® recycling technology for regrind is maximum pellet quality for a maximum amount of recyclate in the new end product.