EREMA Closed Loop Plastic Recycling Blog

Skipping a Step – The Most Efficient Way to Make rPET Preforms

Written by Mike Horrocks | Aug 17, 2018 4:57:34 PM

Ready for the circular economy! Our commitment is to combine environmental sustainability and economic development. The reality is that the use of recycled materials will only significantly go up if we can develop processes that deliver the necessary quality as well as profitability on par with virgin materials. EREMA and SIPA have developed a system that delivers on both of these key criteria – the XTREME RENEW.

EREMA’s Vacurema system takes in washed PET flakes, decontaminates them and raises the IV of the recycled input material to the necessary level. Instead of producing PET pellets, the Vacurema feeds the hot melt in a continued process into the SIPA Xtreme, a continuous injection compression preform molding system.

By skipping the step of pelletizing, we can achieve up to 30% energy savings. The overall system, from washed flake to preform, can produce products using 100% rPET at lower cost per preform compared to a traditional virgin material preform system.

That’s how we can make circular economy happen and develop PET bottle streams that keep using the same material over and over again.