RPET FLAKE
Driven by a focus on both environmental responsibility and profitability, Spanish recycler RPET FLAKE is transforming how the industry manages plastic reject. With an optical sorting solution from Bühler, the company is turning the waste pile back into profitable, sustainable material. It’s a win-win for the environment and RPET’s bottom line.
Chris Ward, November 2024
There is a challenge that plastic recycling faces, beyond the well-documented area of single-use plastic. This new challenge is a complex balance of sustainable and economic factors. The issue is profitability and the low margins in plastic recycling. Without profit, recyclers are not incentivized to operate. However, Spanish recycling plant RPET FLAKE has found a solution to achieving more profit, while simultaneously reducing waste.
An hour south of Madrid, in the heat and natural beauty of central Spain, lies the municipality of Tarancón, Cuenca. Against an expansive backdrop of fields, a thriving plastic recycling plant, RPET FLAKE, recycles plastic bottles back into the economy – a mission that has an impact far beyond the province of Cuenca to the whole of Spain and across Europe.
The company recycles PET plastic, or polyethylene terephthalate, a polymer commonly used for bottles, food containers, and textiles. By putting it through a recycling process, PET can be transformed into new products. This reduces the reliance on using virgin plastics manufactured from previously unused materials and minimizes waste.
With 500,000 bottles processed per hour, RPET FLAKE is one of Spain’s leading recyclers of bottle-to-flake PET plastic. To address the economic realities of the plastic industry, Chairman and General Manager Antonio Martínez Mocholí focuses on processing PET, a plastic which has a longer life cycle and lower carbon footprint than other plastics, while also aiming to improve profitability. “There is waste all over the world. We wanted to make a change. Here in Spain, we process high quality recycling with the mission of giving packaging a new life. It makes us proud to keep the environment clean and contribute to a positive change in the world,” explains Mocholí.
Before diving into RPET’s solution to profitability and waste, it is important to understand the process a plastic bottle undergoes once it is dropped in a recycling bin. After bottles are deposited into a recycling container, they are collected and compressed into rectangular bales and then transported to a plastic recycling facility, such as RPET FLAKE in Spain.
The bales are then broken open and undergo a pre-wash to remove excess dirt and debris. Once washed, the bottles are sorted on bottle sorters, where foreign material, color, and polymer defects are removed, before being shredded, washed again, dried, sieved, and then passed through color and polymer flake sorters. Finally, the flakes go through a decontamination, extrusion, and thermo-forming process, which reshapes them back into bottle form.
In this industry, the challenges change every day, and likewise, the raw material is always changing. For this reason, SORTEX is a critical work tool in our plant to be competitive in the marketplace.
Antonio Mocholí,
Chairman and General Manager at RPET FLAKE
For many, this is where the journey ends. RPET FLAKE recognized an opportunity at one critical stage of the process. After the first bottle sorting, a step that sorts for clear uncolored bottles and discards the rest, the company introduced a system to also sort blue, green, and multi-colored PET plastic. This step involves separating the colored “reject” that would normally be down-cycled or sold for lower-value applications.
“By retrieving these extra flakes, we have opened new market opportunities while reducing overall waste,” says Mocholí. To achieve this goal, he reached out to Bühler and Pellenc ST, a partnership that offers the complete bottle-to-flake sorting line. Like RPET FLAKE, Bühler and Pellenc ST share the mission of sustainable processing as well as an awareness of the challenges. These include the shortage of feedstock, which makes it more important than ever to have a system that gives maximum yield. After consulting a variety of solution providers, it was ultimately the combined expertise and technology of this partnership that sealed the deal.
As anyone can imagine, plastic waste is full of unwanted materials. These include colored plastics, other unwanted polymers, and metals. However, there is still good PET mixed in the batch. Bühler’s recovery solutions can identify the good PET, retrieve more good plastic from the reject stream, and significantly increase the overall yield of high-quality recycled PET. “The sources of the bottles are continually changing, so you need a technology that enables you to achieve the quality you require whatever the source that you are using,” explains Mocholí.
The Bühler solution uses a combination of optical sorting and artificial intelligence, meticulously scanning and separating the good plastic flakes from the contaminants in the reject stream.
Once the bottle sorting is completed via Pellenc ST’s optical sorting line, RPET FLAKE redirects the rejected and shredded mixed color plastic into the SORTEX N PolyVision. This is a specialist polymer sorter that effortlessly removes non-PET polymers from the good PET before sending it to the SORTEX B MultiVision to finalize the sort with separate blue, green, and mixed color outputs. Simply put, instead of only taking pure transparent flakes to market, RPET FLAKE can now add value to their business by effectively creating a new market for purified green and blue PET flakes.
“RPET FLAKE recognized the need for a system that can retrieve good color flakes alongside the traditional clear flakes. To achieve this, they need to have greater insight into what’s happening in the process so that they can better manage it and become more efficient,” explains Lawrence Kuhn, Market Lead for Plastics at Bühler SORTEX. “Using the SORTEX monitoring system, they are able to monitor in real time what’s happening in the line, the fluctuations in the input streams, and make changes to the programs on the machines remotely from the control room.”
By separating colored plastics, RPET FLAKE is embracing new market opportunities and putting its mission to make plastic as environmentally friendly as possible in action. According to a report from Waste Managed, the UK’s leading waste management company, 8 million tonnes of plastic end up in our oceans worldwide every year. That’s the equivalent weight of 4 million mid-size sedan cars. With numbers like this, it becomes apparent how important RPET FLAKE’s mission is.
Luckily, PET plastic adapts well to recycling. With a processing plant powered by the technology of Bühler and Pellenc ST, RPET FLAKE is determined to realize its vision of a circular and sustainable future while making plastic recycling more profitable.
“In this industry, the challenges change every day, and likewise, the raw material is always changing. For this reason, SORTEX is a critical work tool in our plant. The machines help us to be competitive in the marketplace by increasing our yield, quality, and margins,” says Mocholí.
RPet Flake recognized the need for a system that can retrieve good color flakes alongside the traditional clear flakes. Using the SORTEX monitoring system, they are able to monitor in real time.
Lawrence Kuhn,
Market Lead for Plastics at Bühler SORTEX
Despite processing millions of plastic bottles every day, for RPET FLAKE, every flake is important in terms of quality, waste reduction, and higher profits in a challenging market environment. Tackling plastic waste can seem like an overwhelming task. But with waste recovery solutions that allow processors to keep waste to a minimum while generating more market opportunities, and ultimately, more profit, there is hope. Visionaries like Mocholí and RPET FLAKE are already fulfilling that hope and creating positive change. They offer a road map for future success and sustainability within plastic. “It is critical for our success to work with companies like Bühler and Pellenc ST, because they are not only suppliers, they are also partners. They help us to be competitive in the market and provide the best technology,” says Mocholí. “This enables us to have a top-quality product with a high yield and gives us a margin high enough to sustain and grow the business.”
Who: RPET FLAKE
When: Founded in 2018.
Where: Qeunca, Spain
What: RPET FLAKE is one of Spain’s leading PET-bottle-to-flake processing plants. It is on a mission to end plastic waste.
Customers: The company serves customers in Spain and other European countries.
Bühler: RPET FLAKE uses Bühler’s PET flake optical sorting technology and Pellenc ST’s bottle sorter to ensure maximum PET quality and increase yield.
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