Erema launches biggest ever polyolefin recycling machine | Sustainable Plastics

Oct 16, 2024

At 12 meters long, the INTAREMA 2325 is the largest size of the well-known INTAREMA system to date

Much as last year, 2024 is being a challenging year for European plastics recyclers. Demand continues low, imports and virgin material beat recyclate on price, and interest rates are only starting to ease. Recyclers from Germany to the Netherlands have entered insolvency or gone bankrupt.

Erema – the world’s leading plastics recycling machinery manufacturer – is responding by launching its biggest ever polyolefin recycling system at Fakuma.

Why? Because a consolidated market needs bigger machines, Erema’s managing director Robin Roth told Sustainable Plastics.

“I think there will be a consolidation in the market. Someone who is selling virgin material today has the market excess. If tomorrow someone asks him to quote for 30% of the material in post-consumer, then, of course, he would like to be able to sell the material himself. I think the big suppliers of virgin material are preparing to also become the suppliers for regrind material. So yes, there will be market consolidation - companies will be acquired, or merged, and bigger groups will be created. And bigger groups will require bigger machines. Erema will be the supplier of these bigger machines,” Roth said.

Robin Roth

The INTAREMA 2325

At Fakuma, Erema is introducing a whole new dimension to the polyolefin recycling market. The INTAREMA 2325 is the largest size of the well-known INTAREMA system to date. The new model has a preconditioning unit diameter of 2.30 metres and an extruder screw with a diameter of 250 millimetres, reaching a throughput of over four tonnes per hour for polyolefin regrind.

"New legislation and the voluntary commitment of major product brands mean that in the future, our customers will need to process an increasing volume of plastic waste to make high quality recycled pellets without any compromises," said Markus Huber-Lindinger, also managing director at Erema. "The INTAREMA 2325 is our answer to this need."

The legislation in question is the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), which Roth says should have come ‘two, three years earlier, and with less transition periods’ since it will ‘definitely give a boost to the industry’.

“We are happy about this political push, but it takes time… We are doing our homework now that we have a little more time and do not have the stress of the last years. We are preparing for the next boom – it will come,” Roth predicted, without detailing exactly when.

When it does, the new INTAREMA 2325 will be ready to process large volumes of recyclate.

Largest laser filter ever

The machine incorporates the largest laser filter system Erema has ever built. The 2/406 Quattro Laser Filter has a total filter area of 7,800 square centimetres and contributes to the high stability of the system thanks to its robust design and precision filtration.

After the extrusion phase, the contaminated plastic melt flows via a circular distributor ring into the housing between two parallel configured laser-drilled screen discs. The melt is then pressed through the screen discs, flows through and leaves the filter in a clean state via the collection channel. The contaminant particles collect on the screen as the melt flows through. A scraper disc with three scrapers on each side rotates between the screen discs. The pressed on scrapers lift the contaminants from the smooth, hardened screen discs and forward them directly to the discharge system.

Many of the specially built large-scale components were installed and matched together for the first time for the INTAREMA 2325, including 690 Volt motors. The control panel array is also new - at 12 metres long, the electrical container is imposing, but it is compact relative to the size of the machine. Erema assures that the well-arranged configuration makes prior installation, transport, and maintenance work straightforward.

Counter Current technology

Like all INTAREMA machines, the 2325 model is also equipped with Erema’s Counter Current technology. It moves the plastic material through the preconditioning unit in the opposite direction to the extruder screw, ensuring a consistently high output over a wide temperature range.

The key principle of the TVEplus Counter Current system lies in melt filtration upstream of extruder degassing. This makes it possible to produce recycled pellets of high quality, meaning that the proportion of recycled plastics used in the final product can be significantly higher than with lower-quality recycled pellets.

"Our extensive trials with around 500 tonnes of material have shown that the INTAREMA 2325 impresses with high-quality recycled pellets at high throughput rates, all within a very stable process," said Sophie Pachner, R&D Manager for process engineering at Erema.

The INTAREMA 2325 is available immediately and can be purchased through Erema’s fast track scheme. Sales resulting from Fakuma might give a boost to the company’s books.

Sales growth flat

During last year’s Fakuma, Erema talked of percentage sales drops in the double digits in comparison with the 2021/2022 financial year. This year, Roth expects the company to end up close to 2022/2023 levels and see single-digit growth in revenue.

“Everybody knows that we are not in a booming economy. We are used to big growth, but we will not have that. We are seeing more of a sideways movement, maybe even a little downwards,” Roth noted.

The Erema Group manufactured 290 extruders for recycling during the company's 2023/2024 financial year, generating a total of €380 million in sales. That compares to €355 million in sales in the 2023/2022 financial year and production of 350 extruders.

“Our customers, especially in Europe, are still suffering from virgin material imports at lower prices. So it's still a hard time for our customers. And when our customers are having a hard time, of course we try to align with them and make the best out of the situation,” Roth said.

India, China, US pick up the slack

Whilst business in Europe has declined, sales from India, China, and the United States have helped balance things out somewhat, Roth said. Erema sees a ‘very strong market’ in India, as the country continues to roll out plastics recycling legislation.

“India is booming because they also have a legislation that's supporting the recycling industry, different to many Southeast Asian markets. India is taking it very seriously, also with big consulting money that they spent on developing their economy to be circular. They don't want to make the mistakes that were made in many Southeast Asian countries - India is prepared,” Roth added.

Even though China’s economy has slowed down this year, Erema is still getting ‘good orders’ from the Asian country, with individual clients putting in orders for many machines, Roth revealed.

No plan to move production abroad

The many woes facing the European market have led German and Austrian machine manufacturers like Arburg and Wittmann to move production or assembly abroad. No such plans are on the cards for Erema, Roth confirmed.

“I wouldn't say never, but there is no plan. Our core focus is not to produce very cheap machines. Our focus is being a partner to our customer. Yes, we are a machine manufacturer, but we don’t put this at the core. We are a competence centre. We do production support and everything that comes along with production – documentation, supporting customers in fulfilling the necessary measures to supply a good product. We supply investment goods for the next 20 to 30 years – materials will change, governmental rules will change, the market will change, but we remain a constant to our customers throughout that time.”

“There is more to partnership than just supplying a machine. That's how we differentiate ourselves from Asian and other competitors. Yes, the capital expenditure at the moment might be a little higher – but it is a partnership for the next 20 to 30 years,” Roth emphasised.

Whilst Erema has no plans to move production outside of Europe, it does want to decentralise its service support by offering customers qualified service technicians in their time zone and preferably in their own language.

This change in strategy, Roth explained, was not only triggered by learnings from the Covid-19 pandemic, but also from the fact that it is increasingly difficult to find technicians who are willing to spend substantial amounts of time travelling.

Erema has adapted to these conditions by developing an online customer support tool to quickly connect customers with the appropriate technician, and an in-house training programme for employees.

“We frequently bring together service technicians from different continents, so that they can also learn from each other. We have two to three weeks for training with a lot of interaction. With over 8,000 machines supplied across the world, we needed to create this international service network,” Roth said.

Chemical and textile recycling

Erema’s mission is to support its customers with a broad range of product offerings. From bottle-to-bottle to post-industrial recycling, from polyolefins to textile and chemical recycling – the ‘new kids on the block’, Roth said.

Fakuma visitors will also be able to explore Erema’s developments for these two applications. The CHEMAREMA portfolio, for example, offers custom-built solutions for the wide variety of inputs to chemical recycling. The extrusion systems are designed to meet the requirements of each input stream - incorporating a high degree of flexibility to allow for any variances that occur in the material being fed into the system. Systems range from single-screw melt extruders with preconditioning unit, shredder-extruder combinations and vacuum-assisted extrusion solutions, through to cascade solutions with single- or twin-screw extrusion.

Roth said Erema is talking with ‘all the players’ in the textile and chemical recycling markets in preparation for future growth in demand.

“The core of our business is still, of course, the post-consumer bottle-to-bottle and the post-industrial markets. Textile and chemical recycling are niche, but like we pioneered bottle-to-bottle recycling, we will do the same with fibre. With chemical recycling, everyone’s talking about it, but nothing or very little is happening. Of this little that is happening, our technology and our extruders are there to prepare the material.”

With Erema, customers can rest assured they will not miss out on any current or future trends in plastics recycling, Roth concluded.

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