Sustainable Plastics - May/June 2022 - 22

Q&A
continued from page 20
what we already have.
The directive you referred
to also states that products
must be reparable.
Yes, it's ridiculous today: if
the screen of my €700 laptop
breaks and it costs €450 to repair
and to do so means half of
my laptop will need to be replaced,
the choice is simple. Instead
of replacing the screen, I'll
buy a new laptop. So, it comes
down to design; we need to
design products to last longer.
80% of the lifetime of a product
is determined during the
design stage. It's time to start
thinking about how to design
better products for a longer lifetime.
The average plastic bottle
contains a number of different
types of plastic. This makes recycling
these bottles rather like
trying to recover the original
vegetables after making vegetable
soup. In fact, multilayer
materials, in which the different
layers are laminated together,
are often impossible to recycle.
What are you doing so differently?
We
sort at the flake level, not
at the object level, unlike other
commonly used technologies.
It is a totally different approach.
And it took us more than 10
years to develop and refine the
technology to a point where it
could actually become a viable,
feasible separation and recovery
technology. In 2018, we were
ready to scale up and take it to
the market and then planned
to build a large-scale factory in
Amsterdam.
But finding the funding
proved difficult, as not a single
potential investor was willing to
take the risk. Finally, our founders
used their own money and
resources and together with
a joint venture partner - MSN,
Milieu Service Nederland - they
built the plant in Amsterdam. It
was a leap of faith. They had no
contract with a waste management
company and no support
from external parties. That's the
problem with sustainability: we
all say we want it, but no one
wants to stick their neck out.
We did, and now everyone is
looking to see how we did it.
Today our plant handles the
waste of over 2 million people
22
May/June 2022
There is going to be an
unbelievable shortage of
recycled material.
Lucy van Keulen, commercial director at
Umincorp
- the inhabitants of Amsterdam,
Rotterdam, Utrecht and
The Hague. We can be proud
of the leading example that we
are nowadays, having successfully
shown that plastic household
waste can be a feedstock
source. Take our tray-to-tray
recycling: today our trays from
recycled material are currently
available in a major grocery
store as a packaging material
for fruit.
Tell me about your technology:
what exactly is magnetic
density separation? Why is it
a breakthrough in sustainable
plastics recycling?
Briefly, MDS technology is a
method of separating materials
based on their density. It's
unique in that it can separate
a mixed stream into at least
three different output materials,
in just one single process step.
And it is a radically different approach
from traditional methods,
leading to 80% less CO2
emission.
In what sense, exactly?
We adhere to the scientific approach
that says particles must
'first be liberated, then separated'.
In other words, very early
on in the process, we put everything
through the shredder,
creating particles consisting of
just one type of polymer, unlike
the usual approach, in which
the separation process first
takes place at the 'object' level.
At object level, the quality of
the sorting will always be lower,
simply because nearly all pieces
of packaging are comprised
of more than one type of plastic.
People thought we were crazy,
telling us that by shredding
the waste stream into tiny pieces
we were simply aggravating
the sorting problem. However,
the strength of our MDS technology
is that it can take a mixed
stream of flakes and separate
this with a very high degree of
purity in a single step. Other approaches
cannot do that.
How does it work?
After being collected, the waste
collected from Dutch households
undergoes an initial separation
step during which metals,
rigid plastics, flexible plastics,
paper and such are all separated
out, after which the rigid
plastics are sent to us.
The initial sorting is a rough
process. So what we do is first
separate out all the non-target
products that have been overlooked.
In step two, what we
have left is a stream of target
recyclables only, which is then
put through the shredder, producing
flakes. The third step
involves washing, followed by
the MDS step: a huge bath with
magnets, filled with a fluid of
fine iron particles. These magnets
interfere with the process
fluid. As the plastic flakes flow
through the tank, they separate
into different layers that
match the densities of the various
types of the flakes. PP is
the lightest, so these flakes
swirl near the top; then comes
HDPE, while PET, the heaviest,
floats along the bottom of the
tank. These are the three polymers
that we focus on.
The technology achieves an
amazingly precise level of separation.
And unlike the more
traditional float-sink separation
techniques used elsewhere, our
solution can handle all three
polymers is a single process
step, which traditional methods
cannot.
How sustainable is the process?
Compared
to traditional mechanical
recycling and chemical
recycling, we have the lowest
CO2 footprint by far: 80%
lower compared to conventional
methods. This is thanks to
our all-in-one approach - sorting
and separation in one locations
- and high recovery of
all incoming materials and high
quality of output materials.
PET makes up 50% of all
plastics in packaging, mainly as
bottles and trays. However, the
proportion of waste trays in the
PET fraction of the rigid plastic
waste stream we receive is rising
fast. More difficult to recycle,
trays tend to be discarded
by most recyclers and incinerated.
We
spent almost three years
working to develop and improve
both our plastic recycling
approach and our PET
compounding technology and
were ultimately successful. Today
we are building a new PET
compounding line to produce
PET compounds, which will be
finished by end of this year, enabling
us to recover and recycle
more materials from our urban
mine, i.e., plastic household
waste. And enabling the development
of truly circular materials:
an 'old' tray reincarnated as
a new tray and a former shampoo
bottle from which a new
one is made.
In the near future, packaging
will be required to have a certain
percentage of recycled
content. Is your material suitable
for food-contact applications?
That
is very much dependent
on regulations and legislation.
For PET, yes, with restrictions.
For HDPE and PP, no, that is not
possible. The rules state namely
that food-contact-approved
recyclate must be derived
from minimally 95% food-contact-originated
packaging. And
in the case of HDPE and PP,
that is simply not the case. Both
PP and HDPE are used for so
many other applications in addition
to food-grade packaging.
All sorts of research is going on
and papers are being submitted
in attempts to change the
rules, which are very strict and
based on old technologies. The
current rules do not enable the
innovation needed to make circularity
possible.
According to the commitment
progress report published
by Ellen MacArthur last November,
the top 10 fast-moving consumer
goods companies will
need 9 million tonnes of polymers
in 2025, in just three years'
time, of which 30% is required
to be recyclate. That's 3 million
tonnes, while today only around
1.4 million tonnes are produced.
How are we going to double
Sustainable Plastics - May/June 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sustainable Plastics - May/June 2022
