Indorama Ventures North American Operations have been working with AMUT for a number of years to develop technological and economical solutions to meet high standards for r-PET flakes. As a proven machinery and technology manufacturer that has demonstrated how to best meet these objectives, AMUT has reinforced its commitment to the venture.
AMUT Group
AMUT technology is able to obtain the premier value clean PET flakes
"AMUT technology is able to obtain premier value clean PET flakes."
Yash Awasthi, Vice President of Indorama Ventures North American Operations, said: “The new plant will process more than 100 million pounds of plastic bottles annually into clean PET flakes to produce our FuTuRe-PET … The processed bottles are extremely dirty being post-consumer landfill collected. These are the dirtiest bottles seen in this market and AMUT technology is able to obtain the premier value clean PET flakes from them.
“The cleaned PET flakes will be used to produce new resins for a variety of sustainable products which our clients now demand for their PET packaging products. Our goal is to close the loop on recycling and increase the sustainability of the PET containers”.
The new Indorama Ventures recycling facility will be located in Guadalajara, Mexico, at their Ecomex JV in close proximity to their resin production site.
AMUT will also upgrade an existing unit at the Ecomex plant, making the factory capable of producing over 13,000 pounds per hour of highest quality PET flakes from post-consumer PET bottles coming from landfill.
The new washing plant has been purposely developed by AMUT experts to cope with the necessity of processing very dirty PET post-consumer landfill collected bottles. These bottles require a wet-cold-cleaning technology incorporated in the de-labeller unit. Pre-washing and de-labelling phases are carried out in a cold water process while the turbo and friction washer have hot water flow.
AMUT’s patented turbo and friction washer machines perform the cleaning phase, and the combined action therefore needed to be boosted as the friction force has been increased to remove not only fine pollutants, labels and glue, but even soil.
The bottles are always subject to a high level of cleaning and pollutants removal inside each machine as they undergo a non-destructive high friction and proper residence time.
AMUT technology optimises the operational costs. Freshwater usage is reduced to minimum because the water, which is continuously filtrated, can be re-used during the process and the consumption of energy and cleaning agents is minimised.
