Bepex International, a world leader in process development and process equipment for the food, chemical, mineral, and polymer industries, has announced that it has signed an agreement with Vietnam-based Thanh Tai Gas Company to custom design, fabricate and deliver the first system to South East Asia in its new line of plastic bottle recycling systems, called BePET™. The FDA-approved system will allow Thanh Tai to recycle up to 1.5 billion plastic bottles made of PET, a type of plastic, per year.
“BePET™ cost-effectively recycles PET plastic flake while simultaneously controlling final product quality,” said Ralph Imholte, President and CEO, Bepex International. “Our new system can help the industry move towards greater sustainability by making the resulting recycled PET flake more cost effective and useable in more ways than other current PET recycling systems offer.”
The system is unique because it allows the processing plant operator to control both decontamination of the plastic and product intrinsic viscosity (IV) – a measure of the strength of the plastic polymer, which determines how the resulting plastic can be used – at the same time and in solid form. Different IV plastic can be used for different applications; for example high IV can be used for tire cord applications, while low IV plastic can be used for fiber applications such as fleece, or carpet. Additionally, the system’s innovative process design allows operating and capital costs to be some of the lowest in industry, with savings of up to 60 percent when compared to currently available recycling systems.
“BePET™ is designed to conduct flake-to-flake recycling for bottle-to-bottle (BtB) applications, while still allowing extreme flexibility to produce product suitable for other applications such as fiber or carpet,” said Mr. Hieu, owner, Thanh Tai Gas Company, “In selecting BePET™ for our process needs, we also were impressed with the highly customized solution the Bepex engineering team was able to provide to us for our unique situation here in Vietnam.”
Since the 1970's, Bepex has been a world leader in solid state polymerization (SSP) of PET polymer and has installed over 100 systems on six continents. Virtually all soft drink and water bottles produced globally are made of PET. On average, it takes 70 percent less energy to produce a product from recycled plastic than from raw materials. According to a 2010 NAPCOR report, the total number of pounds of PET bottles and jars available in the United States for recycling in 2009 was 2.33 million metric tonnes, and just 28 percent was collected for recycling.
The first line of the FDA-approved system for Thanh Tai will be installed and fully operational by January 2012 after which a second parallel line will be installed to expand capacity to produce different IV plastic for a variety of applications, especially for the food packing industry.
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