Italian melt filtration specialist Fimic, which is exhibiting on Stand B04 at next week's Plastics Recycling Show Europe, says it had a busy month in January. The PRS Europe exhibition and conference, which is organised by Crain Communications, takes place in Amsterdam on 29-30 March.
Fimic installed a total of five custom-designed systems in five different countries in January. The five lines are handling very different material streams: LDPE post-consumer; LDPE post-industrial; LDPE post-industrial and post-consumer mixed; PP post-consumer big bags; and HDPE and PS unwashed post-industrial.
One of the projects was in the US for an existing Fimic customer handling 2,800 kg/h of post-consumer LDPE with around 8% cardboard content. This is the recycler's second Fimic line which is designed for recycling LDPE packaging waste into profiles containing recyclate. Fimic said it provides a throughput of approximately 1,500 kg/h thanks to the use of a Fimic RAS600 melt filter with 600 micron punched screen, which was customised with some optional special accessories.
The requirements of this North American profile application did not require fine filtration, so the customer is using Fimic punched screens. The other four filters installed by the company during January use laser filtration (100-250 micron), “guaranteeing superior product quality and a lower percentage of melt loss”, according to Fimic.
One of these customers is Anviplas, which is located near Barcelona in Spain. It has installed a new Starlinger RecoStar dynamic 165 C-VAC extruder with a Fimic RAS700 melt filter with a constant filtration of 100μm to handle 1,500 kg/h of post-industrial and post-consumer LDPE films.
Anviplas general director Aleix Vintró Anglès said losses of between 7-10% on the original line have been reduced to 0.7-0.9% using the Fimic melt filter. This is important as it will allow Anviplas to increase the percentage of post-consumer material in the input stream and to increase sales margin, while at the same time keeping output quality unchanged.
* Register for the PRS Europe conference and exhibition at www.prseventeurope.com.