The principle of Pet Bottle Recycling Machine

PET bottle recycling machine is the process of separating bottles and magazines (including label separation, bottle surface decontamination, bottle sorting, metal removal, etc.) by passing the collected, used PET bottles through specific recycling and cleaning machine and then processing the bottles into pieces and then cleaning and purifying them again, so that the final product can be used as recycled PET material.

What are the processing steps of the Pet Bottle Recycling Machine?

1. Unbundling process
Before entering the cleaning section, the bundled PET bottles need to be dismantled into individual pieces, which is beneficial to the subsequent process of removing contaminants (such as labels, sediment, metal, etc.) from the unique pieces. At this stage, there are two main types of unpacking methods in the industry: vertical unpacking and horizontal unpacking according to the placement direction of the unpacking shaft. Some processes will use the whole bottle cleaning machine to turn and stir now on the bottle brick for non-directional unpacking.
2. Heat shrink label separation link
PET bottles with heat shrink labels (mainly made of PVC, PET or OPS) cannot be removed by whole bottle cleaning, which is a troubling problem for the PET bottle recycling industry. The concept of this link is to tear the label on the bottle's surface so that the title is no longer attached to the bottle and then to support a specific way to separate the broken label from the bottle.
3. Whole bottle cleaning session
They are removing external impurities as much as possible before bottle crushing is an essential basis for guaranteeing the quality of the final PET bottle pieces and reducing production costs. The host of this link is divided into two sections; the first section is the cleaning section, the material and pharmaceutical water in the cleaning cylinder tumbling and mutual friction to achieve the cleaning effect; the second section is the separation section, the use of gravity, the pharmaceutical water can be separated from the separation cylinder on the mesh plate to take away the leading labels and other pollutants, to achieve the effect of separation.
After the whole bottle cleaning, it can provide a clean environment to the manual selection link and improve the selection efficiency; because of the reduction of impurities, it also makes the whole bottle cleaning subsequent process equipment life is extended; in addition, PVC bottles will appear a specific colour change after heating, which is also easy for us to identify.

4. Automatic sorting / manual sorting link
In areas where the workforce is relatively expensive, automatic sorting equipment plays a vital role. Plastic sorters are divided into bottle pickers and flake pickers, depending on the form of the plastic. Plastic sorters are based on NIR (Near Infrared) and visible light technology to identify plastics of different colours or materials and eject the desired material (positive selection) or unwanted material (adverse selection) by high-pressure air.
As the last quality control before the bottles enter the shredder, the following impurities are removed by manual identification and picking up: non-PET bottles, bottles of mixed colours, other plastics, metals, bottles with PVC labels and bottles with foreign objects that cannot be judged.
5. Crushing link
After entering the crusher, the material is sheared between the moving blades and the fixed blades. The bottom of the body is installed with a specific size mesh plate; after several shearing, the material smaller than the mesh plate aperture will pass through the mesh plate and enter the following link, part of the material slightly larger than the mesh plate aperture will be discharged from the crushing chamber because of extrusion.
The unique structural design of the crusher can be added to the crushing process of water so that the bottle flakes for the first friction cleaning while reducing the temperature of the crusher chamber and reduce the wear and tear of the tool; the most important is to reduce the generation of powder.
6. Hot washing and float washing of bottles
To reduce the impurities in the final product to 100ppm or even as low as 50ppm, it is essential to wash the crushed bottle flakes twice. This link consists of hot water cleaning, turbo friction cleaning, water media separation supporting automatic chemical water filtration system and automatic dosing system. The close connection and reasonable matching of functions can effectively remove caps, rims, oil and beverage left inside the bottles, external glues and other impurities.

7. Bottle flake rinsing unit
After the bottles are hot washed, some chemicals will remain on the surface bottles. At the same time, the suspended matter left in the bottles from the hot washing will be further removed in this unit to ensure the cleanliness and transparency of the bottles.
In addition, the small plastic recycling machine has structural units such as drying, mixing, dust separation and bag filling units to achieve the functions of drying, homogenizing the impurity content, removing dust and bag filling and storage, respectively.

PET bottle recycling cleaning line technology development trend

Traditional cleaning industry, equipment maintenance is based on the experience of the operating worker's judgment and manual records of the cumulative time of equipment work. But these may be due to human factors error and cause the equipment to miss and forget to repair. The cleaning industry is now also gradually adopting the IAS system to monitor and record the equipment's operation automatically and feed the plant manager's data in real-time for work arrangement.
At present, high-efficiency equipment in the industry generally requires a high cost of investment. In contrast, low-cost equipment is often inefficient and severe pollution of the environment. The future of the equipment will tend to the direction of low-cost and high-efficiency development. Plant operation, cleaning and maintenance rely on people to complete; maybe due to the quality of workers and skills to lead to disorder, the future may have robots to complete.
In a word, the future regeneration equipment will develop in the direction of enormous capacity, high efficiency, high automation and low cost.
Energy efficiency ratio analysis
Compared to Asian equipment manufacturers, the European bottle source market standardized management and orderly competition in recycling reserved for its equipment suppliers relatively large space, European equipment in energy consumption and investment costs will be much higher.
For Asian equipment manufacturers, because the complexity of raw materials and recycling channels are relatively imperfect, they have more advantages in the experience of processing raw materials and the corresponding solutions to adaptability. Secondly, the competition for raw materials in Asia is more intense, so investment costs, operating costs and after-sales service of equipment are the primary consideration for investors; for the domestic market, the advantages of Asian equipment suppliers are more and more prominent. Of course, in the material and processing level, the degree of automation and equipment safety and aesthetics and other factors, Asian manufacturers still need time to refine the research and development to polish the light. Contact packer for a quote on a small plastic recycling machine.