Lindner’s Jupiter BW Series Sets New Standards in Film Recycling

Plastics have been an essential part of our daily lives for many decades. Whether in medicine, the food sector or the automotive industry, the easy processing and application abilities of polymers over other materials means that they are represented in a wide range of industries. Packaging materials such as films, primarily made of polyethylene (LDPE, LLDPE) and polypropylene (PP), have a particularly short product life cycle and also account for a significant portion of waste generation worldwide at a total share of around 40%.

Optimising quality in film recycling

Due to the high volume of waste, there is a high demand for efficient recycling solutions for film fractions. Modular washing and drying processes customised explicitly to the input materials – with and without hot wash – ensure the plastic flakes or the regranulate are optimally cleaned. The upstream sorting processes are equally crucial, ensuring that only recyclable materials pass through the washing cycle and are free from metals, non-metals and minerals. However, as important as these specially coordinated processes are, quality sorting starts with the bale opening and shredding. The decisive parameters are output quality, consistent particle size, and a low proportion of fines.

The new Jupiter BW series: 44% fewer fine particles

Lindner is bringing to the market the latest in the Jupiter series, the Jupiter BW. It’s a shredding solution with a shredder set-up specially tailored to film recycling and makes significant quality optimisation a reality right from the first process step – shredding. After bale opening, the films are precisely cut to an A4/A3 size. Due to the continuous film size achieved in this way, downstream NIR systems are able to work within the optimum operating point to detect materials in a more targeted manner and assign them to the correct material stream. ‘Thanks to the new Jupiter BW model, we have successfully adapted the particle size perfectly to the requirements of the NIR systems. What is particularly remarkable is that with the special shredder set-up, we have successfully reduced the proportion of fines that are unusable for the recycler and which have to be disposed of, by 44%, compared to conventional machines. We achieve this through a gently slow-running but powerful shredding operation with special control parameters,’ emphasises Stefan Scheiflinger-Ehrenwerth, Head of Product Management at Lindner Recyclingtech.

All-in-one solutions for plastics recycling

Optimally matching the individual process steps from feeding the baled film to the finished washed flake is a key quality factor. Lindner is one of the few manufacturers to offer all-in-one solutions for recycling post-consumer and post-commercial plastics, from LDPE, LLDPE, HDPE and PP to PET. The shredders are specially designed for plastics recycling, the coordinated downstream sorting processes and, last but not least, the modular and individually adaptable components of the Lindner washing and drying systems guarantee optimised process steps, efficiency, high throughputs and high-quality plastic flakes.