INFLUENCES AND CONSEQUENCES OF MECHANICAL DELABELLING ON PET RECYCLING
- Bastian Küppers - Montanuniversitaet Leoben, Austria
- Xiaozheng Chen - Department of Processing and Recycling, Rheinisch Westfalische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Germany
- Irina Seidler - Montanuniversitat Leoben, Austria
- Karl Friedrich - Montanuniversitaet Leoben, Austria
- Karoline Raulf - Department of Processing and Recycling, Rheinisch Westfalische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Germany
- Thomas Pretz - Department of Processing and Recycling, Rheinisch Westfalische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Germany
- Alexander Feil - Department of Processing and Recycling, Rheinisch Westfalische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Germany
- Roland Pomberger - Montanuniversitaet Leoben, Austria
- Daniel Vollprecht - Montanuniversitaet Leoben, Austria
- Available online in Detritus - Volume 06 - June 2019
- Pages 39-46
Released under CC BY-NC-ND
Copyright: © 2019 CISA Publisher
Abstract
The recycling of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is an important issue of today’s society. Mechanical recycling makes more sense from an ecological point of view than chemical PET recycling. However, mechanical recycling still is highly susceptible to defilements. Therefore, intensive pre-treatment is necessary to ensure the mechanical production of high-quality recycled PET. An important step in this process is to separate the PET bottles from their labels/sleeves. For this purpose, a newly developed label remover was studied. In this study, it was found that the machine had a delabelling efficiency of 90 w%. The PET bottles that were not sufficiently delabelled (10 wt.%) on average had a significantly smaller bottle size. This means that a sharp screening step, prior to delabelling, could improve the delabelling efficiency furthermore. Additionally, the applicability of near-infrared sorting technology was tested to find out, whether it can be used for quality control. Tests showed that state-of-the-art technology could differentiate between labelled and delabelled PET bottles, enabling separation of labelled PET bottles from delabelled bottles via sensor-based sorting. Hence, the proportion of contaminated PET bottles could be reduced furthermore with additional processing steps.Keywords
Editorial History
- Received: 17 Jan 2019
- Revised: 26 Apr 2019
- Accepted: 03 May 2019
- Available online: 24 May 2019
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