NEWS

Chozen announced a significant new technology machinery investment, making the company to be able to produce its own bottle-to-bottle PET recycling facility located in Krian, Balongbendo. Using the advanced equipment from Erema, it is the company's latest step in its drive to create a truly circular economy in PET.

The VACUNITE® bottle to bottle equipment allows the company to increase the capacity of its production significantly. The investment of the new equipment has been made in response to the demands of the market and legislations from governments around the world regarding the use of recycled plastic in end products. The new equipment will be running on the Q1 of 2024. 

With newly developed VACUNITE® bottle-to-bottle technology, Austrian recycling machine manufacturer EREMA redefines the benchmark for performance in bottle-to-bottle recycling: highly efficient decontamination, best colour values, top IV stability, low energy consumption during the entire process and the compact design meet even the highest demands in the production of food-grade rPET pellets.

This is made possible by the intelligent combination of VACUREMA® technology and vacuum-assisted Solid State Polycondensation (SSP) to create a process in which all thermal process steps are performed in a nitrogen and/or vacuum atmosphere. VACUNITE® is the answer to the challenges facing PET recycling, because in order to be approved for contact with food, recycled PET plastics must meet increasingly stringent quality criteria. At the same time, the demand for high-quality recycled pellets is increasing because legal requirements and voluntary commitments of leading brand manufacturers demand a higher use of recycled material in the end products. Although this development increases the overall collection rate, it also reduces the quality of the material to be recycled, as the collected material inevitably has a higher proportion of inhomogeneous components. 

The best technologies in one plant

The VACUNITE® process is based on the combination of VACUREMA® technology - which has been proven over the past 20 years and has been further developed for this application - together with newly patented vacuum-assisted Solid State Polycondensation (SSP), which Polymetrix developed for EREMA especially for this demanding application. What makes this combination so special is that all thermal process stages take place in nitrogen and/or vacuum atmosphere, largely eliminating undesirable flake and pellet discoloration and reliably removing additives which could lead to unfavourable reactions in the melt. Another benefit of VACUNITE®: the nitrogen used in the SSP is cleaned and can be fed back into the previous processing stage so that nitrogen consumption is reduced as a result. To increase the transparency of the preforms, the pellets are dedusted again before filling.

You can learn more about Erema here: 

https://blog.erema.com/advanced-pet-polyethylene-terephthalate-recycling-technology#higher_pet_recyclate_content_in_end_product_requires_innovative_recycling_process