Key Highlights:
- Ambiente tackles the challenge of getting strongly smelling agricultural films and detergent bottles back into the plastics loop.
- The company produces high-quality deodourised regranulate from washed agricultural films and detergent bottles on a Starlinger recoSTAR dynamic 165 C-VAC recycling line with the aim of keeping more plastic products in a closed loop.
- To accommodate a wide range of input materials, the entire recycling process can be individually adapted according to the contamination and odour intensity of the input material and the desired specifications of the produced regranulate.
Ambiente
Often heavily contaminated, with high humidity levels and strong smell: post-consumer plastic waste is anything but a recycler’s dream. The Portuguese plastics recycling company Ambiente S.A. has taken on the challenge and produces high-quality deodourised regranulate from washed agricultural films and detergent bottles on a Starlinger recoSTAR dynamic 165 C-VAC recycling line with the aim of keeping more plastic products in a closed loop.
The Starlinger line took up operation in June 2024 in Ambiente’s new factory in Leiria, north of Lisbon, where the company recycles both industrial and domestic post-consumer plastic waste. A large share of it consists of discarded LDPE agricultural films and HDPE detergent bottles which Ambiente converts into pellets for film extrusion and blow moulding applications.
Ambiente
“For us it is important that we produce a high-quality recycled product that can be reused in the same application,” said Paulo Pires, managing director of Ambiente S.A. “Our goal is to establish a circular economy. This means circularity within the respective application – for example, irrigation pipes become irrigation pipes again, agricultural film becomes agricultural film, food packaging becomes food packaging, and so on.
"Furthermore, we want to explore new applications for input materials with strong odours and high contamination levels. For this, all contaminants need to be eliminated as thoroughly as possible in the recycling process. That’s why we are investing in the best available technologies – from washing, extrusion and filtration to odour treatment. Our objective is to generate economic and environmental benefits by offering the plastics industry feedstock that is sustainable as well as competitive to make a circular economy become reality.”
Odour-improved recycled pellets
The recoSTAR dynamic 165 C-VAC recycling line installed at Ambiente features Starlinger’s renowned odour reduction technology and processes detergent bottles made of HDPE and washed post-consumer agricultural LDPE films. “Agricultural films are used for various applications – for example in greenhouses, as crop covering, or for silage. This results in organic residues being present even after washing which create gases in the subsequent recycling process,” explained Paul Niedl, commercial head of Starlinger recycling technology. “In case of packaging applications such as detergent bottles the smells of their contents migrate into the packaging material during their shelf life and usage time. Our odour reduction technology is designed to permanently remove such odours so that the produced regranulate is suitable for high-level applications. Instead of downcycling it can be reused in the same application, which creates circularity.”
To accommodate a wide range of input materials, the entire recycling process can be individually adapted according to the contamination and odour intensity of the input material and the desired specifications of the produced regranulate. The process starts with cutting and homogenising the input material in the SMART feeder where the material is also heated until it reaches the ideal operating point. Highly volatile odours are extracted already during this process step.
After the main extruder the melt passes through continuous melt filters where solid contaminants are removed so that they cannot release odours during the following process steps. In the subsequent C-VAC module the melt surface is increased by 300 %, achieving extremely high degassing efficiency. This ensures that even deeply embedded odours are permanently extracted. In the final step, the produced recycled pellets are treated in the pellet conditioning unit (PCU) at the end of the recycling process to extract the most persistent odours. This ensures permanently odour-improved regranulate that can be used for manufacturing a wide range of plastic products.