AFBL decided to start bottle-to-bottle recycling to reduce the growing environmental burden, as well as for economic reasons. “On a competitive market, recycling is the best solution to improve environmental conditions”, said Mohammed Sadikur Rahaman, Plant Operations Director at AFBL. “If you look inside our state-of-the-art recycling facility, you see mountains of used plastic bottles which were thrown away after being used once and became a threat for our environment. Now, each year billions of them will be turned into PET flakes and pellets in order to become new bottles.”
The Starlinger recoSTAR PET 165 HC iV+ installed at AFBL’s production site in Dhaka has taken up operation beginning of April 2022. It turns PET flakes into food-contact rPET pellets and has a production capacity of up to 1,800 kg/h. The recycling process starts with a two-stage heating and drying phase of the washed flakes for optimum preparation for the extrusion process. After extrusion, filtering and pelletising, the produced rPET pellets undergo vacuum treatment in the downstream SSP reactor. This increases the intrinsic viscosity (IV) and effectively decontaminates the pellets so that they can be used for food-contact applications. AFBL currently includes a share of 20 % to 40 % of recycled PET in its beverage bottles for water and carbonated soft drinks.
