Waste Plastic Bottles Urgently Need High-Quality Recycling

Beverage bottles that can be seen everywhere in people's daily life are an important resource that can be recycled and reused. Even after processing and processing by professional factories, they can be turned into food-grade beverage bottles and put into the market for recycling. In order to promote the development of the domestic "bottle-to-bottle" circular economy, INCOM's food-grade recycled polyester chip factory in Tianjin has been put into use recently. However, due to the current uneven quality of waste plastic bottle recycling, the efficient "bottle-to-bottle" cycle still faces considerable challenges.

Explore the circular economy and regenerate many heterocyclic nodes

Sorting, crushing, cleaning, granulation...In a factory in Baodi Economic Development Zone, Tianjin, the waste beverage bottles are processed by the production line and finally turned into clean polyester chips. These chips are cast into preforms and blow bottles. Later, it can be turned into a new beverage bottle and put into market use. This factory is the result of INCOM's relocation and upgrading of the original Beijing factory. After it is fully put into production, it can process about 1 billion waste beverage bottles a year, weighing 50,000 tons. This is currently the only food-grade recycled polyester chip factory in China.

This "bottle-to-bottle" circular economy offers a good way to reduce plastic waste and promote the standardized and high-value use of plastic bottles. However, in order to achieve efficient recycling of waste plastic bottles, the industry still faces considerable challenges.

After the waste plastic bottles enter the production line, they need to be sorted manually after being sorted automatically by the machine. Chang Tao, general manager of INCOM, said that most of the equipment in the new plant was imported from Europe, but the addition of many front-end heterocyclic joints directly led to the increase in the cost of back-end regeneration treatment.

Classification awareness is not strong, random discarding is common

As consumers have not formed a sense of waste classification for a long time, the high-quality recycling of waste plastic bottles is still facing resistance.