In the course of further capacity expansion, the Arabian company purchased a new production line for the manufacture of PET strapping tapes made of 100 % non-dried post-consumer bottle flakes. Further, the line can process shredded preforms and shredded straps or a mixture out of these materials.
It was the avoidance of the time and energy intensive drying and crystallisation of the PET flakes which convinced Consent Plastic of the Gneuss MRS extruder. Compared to Consent’s previous production line including a single-screw extruder, crystallisation and drying processing steps, the footprint of the line could be reduced by 12 % and the energy requirement by 20-25 %. Further, the strapping tape produced with the MRS extrusion line is of much better quality in terms of tensile strength, stretch and splitting. This is a result of the intensive mixing effect of the MRS in the degassing section and the high degassing efficiency. Further, there is no need for work-intensive maintenance of the drying and/or crystallisation system, which was necessary with Consent’s previous line, so that the resulting machine downtimes are avoided, too. Last but not least, the line reacts to the greatest possible extent automatically to quality fluctuations in the input material without causing production interruptions.