A facility to recycle polystyrene for use in food packaging has been revealed as a joint project between the British chemical company INEOS, the Norwegian equipment provider Tomra, and the German waste management business EGN. The facility, which will be constructed by EGN at a location in Krefield, Germany, is anticipated to have a processing capacity of 40,000 tons of post-consumer PS yearly. Tomra Feedstock will collect post-consumer polystyrene waste from discarded food packaging and deliver it to a new location expected to be operational by 2025. PS food packaging should not be directly landfilled after use, but should continue to be used as a raw material for plastic packaging. Whether it is hard PS or EPS foam that has been foamed, they are all valuable resources for recycling.

 

However, professional pretreatment is required when recycling foamed PS foam, because the foaming process not only makes this material have excellent shock absorption ability, but also makes this packaging famous for its light weight and large volume. Foamed PS foam consists of multiple foamed beads, 98% of which are air. If you want to efficiently recycle this foam material, you must first find a way to empty the air out of it. At present, Tomra Feedstock wants to use chemical methods to recycle hard PS. After purification and decomposition to achieve the purpose of resource reuse, how can the foamed PS be recycled at the lowest cost? At present, foam compactor can be used in the shortest time Evacuates air from post-consumer packaging for efficient, low-cost recycling.

 

Recycling with GREENMAX Apolo foam compactor

Apolo series foam compactor 100% uses cold pressing technology to compress, breaks the foamed PS foam into pieces of uniform size, and then is extruded by a screw to obtain dense foam blocs. The compression ratio of this equipment is 50:1

 

Recycling with GREENMAX Zeus foam compactor

Recycling with the GREENMAX Zeus foam compactor is actually consistent with the principle of the Apolo series of equipment, except that a hot-melt ring is installed at the outlet to heat and melt the surface of the blocs, making the foam fragments more compact and not easy to scatter, so GREENMAX Zeus foam compactor can recycle materials such as expanded PE foam in addition to expanded PS foam.

If you are interested in learning more about recycling expanded foam and recycling methods, please feel free to contact GREENMAX!