Preparation (Pre-granulation processes)

Plastic scrap or waste comes in all manner of shapes and sizes such as plastic bottles, bottle crates, plastic pallets and car bumpers and a variety of material types. Often these plastic materials are not compatible with each other when it comes to recycling so they have to be identified and separated.

It is also necessary to strip off any extraneous materials such as metal or foam which will hinder the recycling process at a later stage.

It may also be necessary to clean the scrap (particularly if the plastic waste comes from packaging applications such as plastic milk bottles).

Before the plastic waste can be melted down and recycled into plastic pellets for moulding into new products it must be reduced in size. At its most basic this is a case of sawing large items of scrap so that they will fit down the throat of the granulation machines.

Shredding is a much more efficient way of reducing the size of large scrap plastic items. A shredder basically consists of a large tank that the scrap is fed into, at the bottom of which are heavy duty rotating blades which quite literally rip the plastic to shreds.

The output of the shredding process is irregular sized strips of plastic which will be up to several inches in length (still too big for the compounding process).

Sorting	Identifying components of differing polymer types to allow them to be processed separately and thus ensure the highest quality feedstocks
Sawing	we can often be dealing with moulded or extruded components which are just too large to fit into our machines and so they have to be cut down to size.
Stripping	The scrap are often post-consumer or post-industrial components which have been assembled into products. This means that they can include metal components, different polymer types and plastic or paper labels. To maintain the quality of the resulting feedstocks, all of these extraneous items must be removed.
Shredding	Shredding is a quick and efficient way of reducing large unwieldly plastic components into a manageable format. The process involves a spinning rotor which rips the plastic apart. The resulting output is irregular shaped, roughly cut product which is generally still too large to use into our compounding processes.