Erema subsidiary Keycycle has acquired the trademark rights to the deinking technology pioneered by Spanish company Cadel Deinking. The process enables printing inks to be removed from the surface of plastics, making these more suitable for recycling.
The companies have already been collaborating intensively for two years and have several deinking lines in operation at customers' sites, where they are used in processing printed in-house and post industrial film waste.
The process developed by Cadel is an environmentally friendly one: water-based chemical ingredients dissolve the ink from the surface of the shredded film or regrind material, after which the material is fed into the recycling extruder. Of the eight plants ordered since the market launch, five are now in operation at customers' sites.
"We have already been exclusively responsible for the worldwide distribution of this patented technology since January 2021, including the operation of the pilot plant together with Cadel in Sant Vicente del Raspeig, in Alicante,” said Keycycle managing director Michal Prochazka. “We are now taking the final step of integrating this process technology into our product portfolio.”
He added that the product not only delivers ‘top quality,’ it now also meets industrial standards. The latter refers to the newest deinking line present at K 2022, with a throughput of 1,200 kilograms per hour. Such large scale capacities make the process suitable for application in the post consumer recycling segment, where the removal of printing inks will represent another significant quality upgrade for recycled pellets.
Following this acquisition of the Cadel Deinking brand, Keycycle will continue to develop the technology. It will be marketed under the Keycycle Deinking brand.
The Cadel company will continue to operate as Cadel Recycling Lab, dedicated to its core competence of developing new innovative technologies for plastics recycling plus laboratory and software techniques for decontamination assessment.