Plastic dry cleaning process

Thanks to its long, worldwide experience SOREMA has been able to develop innovative recycling solutions to properly treat, clean, and separate, at dry conditions, plastics from different contaminants. This process is known as dry cleaning of plastic.

The patent-pending SOREMA DRY CENTRIFUGE, originally studied for the removal of sleeve labels on post consumer PET recycling processes, associated to an aerodynamic separator and some additional particular devices, can obtain an extremely efficient separation ofcontamination removable from the plastic surface.

The use of a dry cleaning process allows an adequate treatment, even for materials destined to those applications in which the presence of water is not possible In addition, the system can be integrated in any full recycling plant, in order to carry out the best pre-treatment for mixed bottles or rigid packaging, obtaining an excellent separation between the light and bulky materials and contaminants.

An important application of dry cleaning is the delabeling process. The process of removing labels is becoming particularly challenging as the use of “full-wrap shrink labels” is becoming more and more common. These labels are not folded around the bottle and glued together at their extremes. On the contrary, heat is used to shrink the labels until they fit perfectly around the bottle. In this way there is no break in correspondence of the two extremes because the label is made from a single piece. This method of applying labels is becoming quite popular in industries because it expands the marketing opportunities. This label can be made of PVC or PETG and is not floating and sink along with the PET flakes This would cause a serious decontamination along the recycling line, compromising the entire process.

In fact, PET bottles with full-wrap shrink labels account for about 5% of all post-consumer but they generate increase difficulties in the recycling PET bottles. We talk about it in the PET bottles recycling machines section.

The patent-pending SOREMA DELABELER is an excellent solution for these recycling problems. The costs of the process are greatly reduced by using this module and the efficiency is significantly increased. The SOREMA DELABELER reduces machine wear and contamination.