Dutch plastics waste processing company Daly Plastics (Zutphen; www.plasticrecycling.nl) has installed six shredders supplied by Lindner (Spittal / Austria; www.l-rt.com) at its agricultural and packaging films recycling facility in Zutphen. Lindner said the six shredders – two "Jupiter 2200" primary shredders and four "Micromat 2000" shredders – provide the facility with the ideal particle size.

The recycling facility, which is operated by Daly Plastics subsidiary Caroda Polymer Recovery, has four granulation lines. It receives about 64,000 t/y of used film, the majority of which is recycled as reusable rPE. The agricultural films are collected from more than 2,500 farmers in the Benelux countries and northern Germany.

After the used film has been pre-sorted, a Jupiter machine shreds the agricultural film so that the drum screen can do a better job of filtering stones and soil out of the material. The second machine shreds post-consumer film to A4 size. “This size is ideal for optical sorting processes,” said Peter Daalder, owner and managing director of Daly Plastics. “It means the sensors can optimally distinguish LDPE from other PE and PP plastic types and separate it from the material stream.” A safety clutch on the shredders prevents machine damage caused by foreign parts and non-shreddables.

Recycling of the film flakes involves fine shredding, dry cleaning, extrusion and resin bagging. Each of the four granulation lines processes one colour of film and is equipped with a Micromat 2000. With a capacity of 2-3 t/h, the Micromat produces 50 mm particles and also performs dosing of the material. The end products are homogeneous grey, black and brown resin pellets, which can be used for the production of tear-resistant film and waste collection bags, among others.