Abstract
Plastic films used in products packaging represent a significant amount of plastic waste that requires to be recirculated, despite the advantages that these films provide such as longer shelf-life for food products or performance enhancement for many other products. The recycling process for post-consumer plastic waste often requires washing and dewatering procedures to be carried out before the material can be reprocessed and transformed into a new product. The dewatering procedure, in particular, is an intensive energy-consuming process due to the need to remove moisture from the material. Centrifugation is typically used for dewatering, many times supported by air dryers, resulting on a significant high energy consumption and a larger foot-print to install this equipment.
This work describes a novel approach for dewatering shredded films that have been washed to remove contaminants from post-consumer use or post-industrial.
The dewatering system is based on a compression stage in which the material is being pressed to remove the largest amount of water, forming a cake that is dismantled afterwards for transportation to the following recycling step. Consequently, this dewatering approach is fully comparable with the pre-existent ones, providing a throughput of 1,5tonnes/hour with a significantly reduced energy consumption, economic advantages and a quite smaller footprint.
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The authors wish to acknowledge to the Plasmaq technical staff involved in this R&D project, headed by Mr. Jacinto Abrunhosa.
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Vasco, J.C. et al. (2021). Energy-Efficient Dewatering Technique for Recycled Films. In: da Costa Sanches Galvão, J.R., et al. Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Water Energy Food and Sustainability (ICoWEFS 2021). ICoWEFS 2021. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75315-3_42
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75315-3_42
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