There’s never been more interest in incorporating recycled plastic into finished products, with taxes and incentives cropping up in countries around the world. Here, the team at ancilliaries expert Jenco argue that centralised blending could make the material easier to process.
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Why use recycled plastics?
Recycling plastics reduces the amount of energy and resources needed to create plastic, including water, petroleum, natural gas, and coal, and it keeps plastics out of landfills. But for most manufacturers, the most significant reason to use recycled plastics is that it costs less than virgin materials – bringing down the cost of production.
The challenge
The problem facing manufacturers is that recycled plastic combined with virginplastic can complicate the production process. The issue is that the amount of recycled plastic used in a product is notconstant; it depends on several different factors including the grade (i.e., the quality) of the plastic, the type of product being produced, how important thequality is for that particular product, and the type of customer.
As a result, when recycled plastic enters the system, recipes need to be adapted to integrate the recycled material effectively. For manufacturers working with local batch blending systems rather than centralized batch blending systems, this is a significant challenge that requires adjusting the recipes for each of the systems in the factory.
Local batch blending systems limit recipe adaptation Local batch blending systems generally are limited in terms of how many types of raw material can be used. This creates challenges when working with recycled plastics.
Some recycled plastics are of a higher grade and some are of a lower grade –
and the lower grade plastics are less expensive. Therefore, sometimes it may be beneficial to create a mixture that includes several recycled materials of different grades.
However, this frequently is not an option supported by the machinery due to the limited number of raw material options supported by local batch blending systems.
In addition, local batch blending systems require the same recipe used for all production machines serviced by each of the blending systems. It’s not possible to define different recipes for the different products.
Centralised blending systems offer greater flexibility and efficiency that eliminate many of the problems that come up, when integrated recycled plastics in production.
Using centralised batch blending, manufacturers can make better use of recycled plastics – thereby cutting down on production costs and improving the bottom line.