The transformation to a circular economy is being driven by the European Commission´s Europe 2020 strategy for growth. The increase in recycling targets aims to encourage European wide industrial symbioses which have set themselves the target of operating holistically and with more efficient use of resources.
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One of these companies is the Spanish company, Llorens GMR in Barcelona. Llorens offers its customer an extensive service, from collection, preparation to the reuse of industrial waste. Llorens has several modern reprocessing and recycling lines.
Llorens has a relatively new extrusion line for reprocessing post-industrial waste film from LDPE and LLDPE, however the filtration fineness which could be achieved with the original equipment Melt Filtration was unable to remove the critical contaminants from the polymer.
Llorens decided to add an RSFgenius Melt Filtration System from Gneuss as a fine filter in order to remove contaminants down to 56 to 100 µm. The Gneuss RSFgenius achieves this at a constant melt pressure, thereby ensuring that gels and black specks are reliably removed. As a result, Llorens is able to use the material produced on this line for high value cast and blown film applications. Llorens´ customers can both fulfil the legal requirement for recycling content and manufacture high quality film.
The company claims that the Gneuss Rotary Melt Filtration Systems can handle high melt pressures and heavily contaminated materials with highly variable contamination loads. At the same time, they with a high level of automation. Exchange of the filter elements takes place under normal production conditions, without disturbances in the process. In addition to this the company claims that thanks to the automatic, segmental high pressure self-cleaning system, the RSFgenius Melt Filtration Systems offers long intervals between filter element changes with a minimum of back flushing material.
In recent years, throughout Europe (and worldwide) a large number of LDPE / LLDPE recycling extrusion lines have been retrofitted with Gneuss Melt Filtration Systems for fine filtration.