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Canadian water bottler Ice River Springs in Feversham, Ont., recently installed a second PET bottle-to-bottle recycling line, which is reportedly exceeding performance expectations. Like the first line installed in 2010, the new line is a recoSTAR PET iV+ system from Starlinger & Co. GmbH of Austria (U.S. office is American Starlinger-Sahm, Inc., Fountain Inn, S.C.). It recycles pre-washed PET bottle flake from curbside collection in Canada and has a capacity of 1900 kg/hr (4180 lb/hr).

For melt filtration, the line is equipped with a Nordson BKG Flex Disc filter cartridge from Nordson Xaloy Incorporated, New Castle, Pa. With this device, production output reportedly is even higher than was guaranteed in the acceptance protocol. Also, the purge rate has been reduced by 40%, and the melt loss due to backflushing is below the minimum values. “With the Nordson Flex Disc filter integrated into our PET recycling system, the melt loss that accumulates during backflushing in the course of filter cleaning is down to 1.4% to 1.7% , a lot lower than normal in PET bottle-to-bottle recycling,” says Paul Niedl, head of sales at Starlinger recycling technology. “The filter works very efficiently; even when processing materials with high contamination that cannot be recycled on other lines, the backflushing melt loss increases to no more than 2%.”