PET Bottle Recycling Line?

PET bottles are a major source of plastic waste, especially in landfills and in the oceans, and PET recycling reduces harmful impacts on marine life, wildlife and ecosystems.

Recycling PET uses less energy than producing new plastics from raw materials. Reducing energy use also means reducing carbon emissions and contributing to the fight against climate change. At the same time recycling PET bottles reduces the demand for virgin raw materials (such as oil) used to make new plastics.

The recycling industry provides employment opportunities at all stages, including collection, sorting, cleaning and processing of plastic bottles. It also generates long-term sustainable profits for recycling companies.

Mechanical recycling is the most widely used method for recovering PET bottles and involves physically processing the plastic to make new products.

Crushing only: for in-plant recycling for preform manufacturers or small recycling plants
Manual sorting – impurity removal – crushing – washing – drying: for manufacturers of fiber and filament grade flakes

Impurity Removal – Optical Sorting of Whole Bottles – Manual Re-Sorting – Crushing – Washing – Drying – Dust Separation – Metal Separation – Automatic Picking – Bagging: for manufacturers of food grade flakes (3A flakes)

Unpacking unit
 Metal chain conveyor
 Unpacking Unit

This design is based on a combination of customer’s labor cost and productivity.
The bundling wire or baling bands are cut off and withdrawn manually and pushed into the buffer groove formed by the (countersunk) chain conveyor by forklift truck to disperse the bottle bricks to a certain extent, while storing a certain amount of raw materials to ensure the uniformity and continuity of the production line’s material supply.

Next, the bottle bricks are transported by the speed-adjustable chain conveyor to the horizontal unwrapping machine, where they are broken up by the operation of four powerful mechanical shafts fitted with wear-resistant cutterheads. The screw lifter then conveys the already dispersed bottles to the next process.

Impurity separation units

 Tumbler screens
 Debris collection system

The high performance double aperture tumbler screen separates external debris such as sand, metal, stone, glass, etc. from the raw material and discharges them through a two-stage collection tank. This reduces the pressure on the back-end of the production process, reduces wear and tear on the equipment, reduces capacity consumption and improves the quality of the finished product. This equipment is especially important for bottles and packages with a high content of impurities.

Label Separation Units
 Screw conveyor/belt conveyor
 Wet de-labelers
 Label Collection System

The label remover rubs each bottle in turn through the high-speed rotating blades, destroying the rolled labels attached to the bottle body, making the rolled labels separate from the bottle body.

From the composition of raw material labels, adhesive labels are easier to remove, and the de-labeling is mainly for heat-shrinkable labels.
Patented blade structure, large diameter, low speed, compressed bottle removal rate: 90-95%, non-compressed bottle removal rate: 98%, more effective in reducing the bottle breakage rate.

Manual selection of units
 Manual picking platforms
 Pneumatic flap for metal detection

The final sorting and screening of bottles before crushing, to screen out the small amount of residual foreign materials (including heterogeneous bottles, bottles of different colors, small amount of label chips, metal reactive materials, garbage, etc.) in the front-end units.
In areas where the recycled bottles are simple (i.e., more than 75% of the bottles are made of a single material or color) or where the labor cost is relatively low, it is recommended to set up a manual screening system.
Otherwise, we can consider setting up fully automatic screening facilities instead, fully automatic screening with optical material sorting machine, color sorting machine (including infrared and X-ray) response signal, detect different colors or different materials of the bottle, signal feedback to mechanical and pneumatic power, screen out the inducted bottles. Any metal substance mixed into the bottles will be immediately detected on the selection conveyor and processed by the pneumatic turntable without stopping the machine.

Whole bottle cleaning units
 Screw conveyor
 Whole bottle washing
The main idea of this process is to remove most of the non-polyester components from the bottles before they are crushed, in order to obtain the maximum amount of pure polyester recycled bottle flakes. The bottle pre-wash is the most important component of the process.
The washing process is combined with mechanical, chemical and thermal forces to remove more than 98% of the impurities (environmental pollutants, paper labels, BOPP labels, etc., but not the undamaged PVC heat-shrinkable labels) contained in the waste PET bottles after the separation and filtration process. Under these conditions, the subsequent process equipment is also protected by the purification of the bottles, especially in the environment of the shredder, avoiding unnecessary wear and tear of the subsequent equipment due to excessive contamination.

–The removal of as many external impurities as possible before shredding is an important basis for ensuring the quality of the final PET bottle and reducing production costs.

Wet Grinding Units
 Dispensing Belt
 Pulverizers
 Screw conveyor

Our pulverizer is set up for wet pulverizing, in addition to using the impact of water to enhance the PET debris cleaning effect, but also due to the cooling effect of water to reduce friction heat, so that the knife to reduce wear and tear to extend the service life. The addition of anti-vibration shims minimizes vibration and noise.
The V-shape shear angle of the movable and fixed knives ensures that the material will not leak from the gap between the screen and the shell. Wear-resistant plates are added inside the crushing box to prolong the service life. External shaft center and special heat treatment process ensure that shaft breakage will never happen.

Cleaning Units
 Float washing machine
 Hot washers
 High-speed friction washers
 Low speed friction washing machine

The bottle is crushed together with cap and ring, the raw material of cap and ring is PP or HDPE, after crushing the mixed fragments, the flotation washing machine makes use of the difference of specific gravity between different plastics (~1.3/~0.8), and uses water with specific gravity of 1 as the medium to make the PET fragments precipitate and the cap fragments float, the cap fragments are collected and can be made into a by-product for sale.

The final purification of PET bottle flakes is to remove the impurities remaining in the PET bottle flakes after the cap flakes are removed.
The final purification of PET bottle flakes is to remove only the stubborn adhesive, oil and other impurities that remain after the flakes have been removed from the PET bottle flakes. The “hot washing machine” utilizes thermal, chemical and mechanical forces. The friction between the bottles and the shear force of the vortex of the chemical water will remove the impurities from the surface of the bottles and remove them by centrifugal dewatering. The dewatered water is simply filtered and reused immediately, resulting in significant savings in pharmaceutical costs. Depending on the cleanliness of the bottles, the reused water can be used for about a week.

The high and low speed friction washer with special spindle blade design has excellent performance in removing adhesive and small impurities from the bottle surface.

Although the surface of the bottles washed by the chemical water is dewatered, there is still a chemical residue on the surface. Therefore, after hot washing
Therefore, after hot washing, a two-stage rinsing of the bottle flakes is carried out with water, which cleans the surface of the bottle flakes from the chemical water, and the pH value of the surface of the bottle flakes will be close to neutral, and the total impurity content of the PET bottle flakes will be reduced to the range of 100ppm.

Dewatering Drying
 Horizontal Dehydrators
 Tube Drying
 Z-Sorting Machine

The moisture content of the final product is an important assessment index for PET recycling. The special design of the shaft and the anti-clogging screen can achieve the highest output, the lowest product moisture content and the lowest failure rate. The design of the whole organization makes the maintenance of the equipment easy. After 2000 revolutions of dewatering equipment with thermal drying, the water content of bottle flakes before packaging can be within 1%.

Z-sorting machine removes dust, fine plastic labels or film from bottle flakes.

Automatic Selection Unit
 Optical automatic sorting of sheets (color + material)
 Eddy current sorting
It is the last process before packaging of finished tablets to further improve the quality of finished products. Fully automated screening is based on an optical material sorter, a color sorter, which detects bottles of different colors or materials and feeds back signals to mechanically and pneumatically screen out the inducted bottles. Eddy current sorter mainly removes aluminum materials through magnetic field coils.

Pet plastic recycling applications in various industries, not only to reduce the dependence on petroleum-based virgin polyester, saving resources can also keep the recycling cycle closed, so that PET becomes a renewable resource. Promoting more sustainable development in multiple industries. The addition of recycled polyester to products in many industries reduces the price of the finished product and recycled products are often more durable.

One of the main problems with PET recycling is the contamination of sources such as food and beverage residues, labels and adhesives, and non-PET items.

Lack of efficient collection and sorting infrastructure, usually only 70-80% of the PET bottle bales from the scrap yard are sorted and utilized. If food-grade flakes are required, the yield of a single flake is less than 30% after sorting by material and color.

Downcycling rather than closed-loop recycling, although PET is a 100% recyclable material, it is usually downcycled into staple fibers and filaments.

There are several well-known manufacturers of PET bottle recycling machines around the world, specializing in various types of equipment used to process and recycle PET bottles into high-quality recycled products. These manufacturers offer solutions for crushing, washing, sorting and pelletizing PET bottles, which are key steps in the recycling process.

1.Chemical fiber grade pet bottle recycling line
PET bottle flakes produced by chemical fiber grade PET bottle recycling washing and cleaning line are mainly used for the production of two-dimensional or three polyester staple fiber, polyester filament, packing tape, flakes, film and other products.
In the entire production line of each process equipment unit configuration, according to the user’s raw material conditions, production sites, product quality investment budget and other needs, planning and designing the best process route and each equipment unit configuration.

2.Food grade pet bottle recycling line
Along with the price drop of whole bottle sorting and optical sorting equipment, the establishment of local recycled food grade polyester chips can not only minimize the production cost of bottles, but also achieve the purification of the local environment and obtain a higher amount of commercial profit. (Proportion of recycled chips used in new bottles mandated by the EU)

Food grade recycled PET chips are highly automated and human errors are minimized. Efficient sorting system can ensure that the raw material is in line with the standard of post-processing. Our food grade pet bottle washing line can be flexibly adjusted and configured for equipment and process according to the difference of raw materials actually produced by customers, in order to meet the actual production needs of different customers.
1500kg/h-3000kg/h standard production line flow chart