The production of recycled plastic takes place following a specific production path called mechanical recycling which is now compared with the most recent procedure, still in the test phase, of chemical recycling. Mechanical recycling therefore represents one of the possible ways of valorising thermoplastic polymers.
Mechanical recycling aims to give life, through mechanical processing, to plastic objects, collected
as waste, which thus become raw-secondary material for the production of new objects.
Mechanical recycling is a possible way of valorisation that implies minimum requirements for the
workability of the material.
The industry in the sector tries to continually improve the techniques for selecting recycled
materials, in particular post-consumer products in order to obtain increasingly “clean” fractions of
homogeneous materials. The selection phase is very important, it must be accurate and involves the
separation of the plastic material from other unwanted materials such as glass, metals and paper,
which can also be followed by a selection of the material for coloring. The quality and success of
mechanical recycling are closely related to the degree of selection since the goal of grinding is to
produce an output as close as possible to virgin plastic.
The mechanical recycling of processing scraps, or waste materials from the industrial circuit, is also
defined as primary recycling because the activity concerns post-industrial materials, such as scraps
or processing waste, homogeneous and not contaminated, which are regenerated
As they are or added to the virgin polymer in the same process. This type of recycling is considered
the simplest to carry out. In fact, if we consider plastic material processing phases such as injection
molding or film production, it is easy to understand that those that are processing waste can simply
be ground and reinserted into the same production cycle.
The field of polyesters recycling, for example, is particularly interesting, because it can involve
many industrial processes in which the processing scraps are recovered and reintroduced into the
plant after the necessary operations including grinding performed with industrial granulators that
they work dry or water, depending on whether it is to grind uncontaminated waste or post-consumer
waste that must necessarily be washed.
The most performing granulators for plastic materials are those capable of grinding large quantities of material at high rates thanks to the oversized mechanics of which they are characterized as the TOP and EASY POWER BRUNO FOLCIERI, available in both the dry and WET versions. The heart is made up of
a rotor made up of blades that resist wear and huge amounts of waste, even the most resistant.
Depending on the type of plastic waste recovered, and sent to the mechanical recycling process,
granules or flakes can be obtained from ground thermoplastic polymers to be used in the production
of new products.