Recycling plant OK Plast, in Kinshasa (Congo) has installed a new PET bottle recycling line supplied by Sorema in cooperation with the Austrian recycling machinery company, Starlinger.
The components for the sorting, grinding and washing stages - key steps in PET bottle recycling technology - were supplied by Sorema. Starlinger supplied the pelletising line for bottle-grade rPET pellets.
The OK Plast facility recycles about 50 tons of plastics daily from Kinshasa. It has a production capacity of 1.2 metric tons per hour of washed RPET flakes suitable for food packaging applications. The new plant is ‘our second of its kind in Africa’, said Mehdi Attieh, general manager of OK Plast.
The feedstock for the plant comes from a number of collection points spread around Kinshasa. The material comes into the Bottle-to-Bottle rPET line and is automatically fed into a pre-washing and de-labeling unit, which removes all external contamination, including sand, grit and organic material. This is followed by wet grinding into flakes, hot washing with friction modules to remove synthetic glues and all residual organic contaminants, flotation and rinsing and drying. The line has colour and material detectors for both bottles and flakes for two stages of sorting. After grinding and sorting by colour, the flakes are transported to a Starlinger recoSTAR PET iV+ plant to be processed into food-grade rPET pellets.
A Sorema-Scada 4.0 digital monitoring system allows the entire line to be controlled both locally and remotely