Italian recycling machinery supplier Amut Group has supplied a washing line to a new recycling facility built by US company CarbonLITE, in Dallas, Texas.
In a statement 11 Jan, said the company said that a "state of the art” washing line had been supplied to the plant, which is the second facility of this size in operation in the US.
The plant, which started operation in September 2017, is capable of producing over 12,000 pounds per hour of “highest quality” PET from MRF (materials recycling facility) post-consumer bales.
The CarbonLITE PET recycling project follows two major PET recycling projects to which Amut supplied in North America: Unifi in Reidsville, North Carolina, and Petstar Coca-Cola Mexico.
The 250,000-square-foot bottle-to-bottle PET recycling plant processes more than 100 million pounds of plastic bottles annually.
The washing section, Amut claimed, is capable of reaching a capacity of six tonnes per hour.
The line, according to Anthony Georges, president of Amut North America, is equipped with Amut's “de-labeller” patent technology and a wet whole bottle pre-wash.
“When you are dealing with co-mingled MRF bottle bales you need to be able to detect and remove all non-PET and colour PET containers prior to entering the final washing process,” Georges explained.
Amut's double-stage process includes a first ‘de-labeller', which carries out dry cleaning and detaches most of the shrink sleeve labels, and a second wet ‘de-labeller', which prewashes whole bottles.
“This wet bottle washing technology utilises the filtered recycled flake washing water; therefore, it does not increase the consumption of fresh water used in the complete cleaning process,” Georges added.
Amut has also supplied a wet grinding system to the plant which turns bottles into flakes, along with two ‘flake friction washers', and two ‘sink-float' separation machines, which are able to capture the polyolefin caps.