As Coperion’s Recycling Days come to an end, over 160 attendees from 27 countries are returning home with a clear message: this century-old company is genuinely dedicated to plastics recycling.
Coperion is not, of course, new to the plastics recycling business. At the 1992 K Show, the Germany-based company was already showcasing a recycling line. But until its acquisition of washing line manufacturer Herbold Meckesheim two years ago, recycling was a ‘by the way’ business unit for Coperion, Markus Parzer, president performance materials division at Coperion, told Sustainable Plastics during a press briefing.
No longer. During the two-day event at its Recycling Innovation Centre in Niederbiegen, Germany, Coperion emphasised how the acquisition of Herbold and the opening of the centre last November has consolidated its dedication to plastics recycling.
The company set up a dedicated recycling business unit as well as a specialised team. Massimo Serapioni came on board as general business manager for the recycling business unit in 2022 and played a central role in acquiring Herbold in the same year.
The Recycling Innovation Centre, together with Herbold’s own test centre in Meckesheim, showcases the company’s new focus on recycling. This dedication ‘has been a long time coming,’ Serapioni told Sustainable Plastics. With only one year between investment decision and completion, the centre itself came along fairly quickly.
The facility is connected to Coperion’s test centre for Bulk Solids Handling, expanding the company’s test lab capacities in Germany alone up to 5,000 square meters.
The Recycling Centre opened in November 2023 and has since been fully booked. Coperion has already performed 34 customer trials at the site, revealed Frank Lechner, general manager process technology at Coperion. Each trial lasts around one week and the machinery is fully cleaned in-between trials to avoid contamination and distortion of results. The site is also fully booked for the next three to six months.
The main customer demands are for quality and high output rates, Lechner explained. The centre has tested all sorts of materials: post-consumer, textile, film, PET – for both large and small plants. The ZSK 58 MC18 recycling twin-screw extruder on site operates on lab scale but can be scaled up to compound 5 to 9 tonnes of rPET per hour, Lechner said.
Currently, the main limitations to achieving even higher throughput, according to Lechner, do not happen during extrusion but rather during sortation. Automatic sortation machines are available with maximum widths of 2.8 meters, which limits the amount of waste they can sort. To sort more waste to improve compounding volumes, recyclers end up having to multiply entire lines instead of processing more material in an existing extruder. Limitations in filtration volumes present similar challenges.
As it has demonstrated through its acquisition of Herbold, Coperion is open to partnerships and to working closely together with other brands to address this and other challenges in plastics recycling.
Two-day conference
The line up of the two-day conference included well-known names like Prof. Edward Kosior, CEO of Nextek, who discussed the current state of play of the recycling industry.
Internal and external experts, including researchers, shared insights on how the right equipment can save resources and costs without compromising quality. Achiem Ebel from Herbold and Kürşat Başdemir from Ekosistem presented the latest advancements in Herbold washing machines, focusing on the impact of water treatment on the quality of recycled compound. A panel discussion at the end of the first day asked what the penalties should be for companies that fail to meet the EU’s 25% mandatory recycled content in PET bottles from 2025 and argued for a centralised response from Brussels.
