M&G picks Amut for bottle to bottle recycling

The Mossi & Ghisolfi group has chosen Italian equipment-maker Amut to supply a recycling plant for postconsumer PET bottles at Poços de Caldas in the state of Minas Gerais, in Brazil. The plant will come into operation in 2013 and will produce high quality flakes for the bottle-to-bottle process. This is the third major recycling line that Amut has supplied to Latin America since the start of 2012, after the Amut Ecotech branded plant supplied to Argentinean processor Tecsan, which handles 1000 tonnes per day of municipal solid waste, and the one supplied to the Mexican Petstar (in which Coca-Cola Enterprises holds a major stake), that handles 3500 kg/hour of PET bottles for the bottle-to-bottle process.
The Brazilian plant will have a capacity of 2000 kg/hour and will be used to process bales of bottles coming from municipal waste collection. Contaminants will be removed by washing, while the recyclable material, that is to say the polyolefins of caps, bands and sleeves, and the PET, will be separated in their turn. The washing is performed by the patented Friction Washer system, a core component of Amut recycling lines. The machine, thanks to automatic regulation of the quantity of flakes, produces mechanical friction that eliminates all contaminants in a continuous process.
Contaminants are carried away by an abundant flow of water and retained by a dedicated filtering system that is highly effective even in the presence of glue. The result is an extremely pure product, with organic residues in the order of 20 ppm, compared to values of 100-200 for traditional systems. The washing uses limited amounts of water (1 litre for 1 kg of PET), which is automatically dosed, filtered and reused multiple times in different parts of the plant, depending on its degree of purity. The concentrations of chemical substances in the circuit are continually monitored, to ensure there is neither waste nor lack of additives and to minimise the running costs of the plant.