Literally - for years - recovering an ongoing and sustainable plastic value derived from end-of-life dismantled electronics has been questionable at best. Almost always, export becomes the outlet - and that is not always available and only at minimal value.

A closure manufacturer was not able to reuse scrap closures because of the foil lining. They did not want to grind the scrap closures and introduce foil into the system. They tried other recyclers that do grinding, extrusion, melt filtering and pelletizing in the past, but the effort resulted in residual foil that plugged the gates in the mold. Moreover, the metal detector fired constantly. The manufacturer’s belief was that the foil lined closures could not be recycled to a purity acceptable to their quality standards.

A pharmaceutical bottle manufacturer generates amber purge, stands and die drool as manufacturing scrap. The material is burnt and discolored from sitting in the barrel and also has adhered cardboard (stray polymers, screen packs, nuts, bolts & screws).

A closure manufacturer had a customer switch from a blue two piece assembled closure to an orange PP closure that required a paper liner. With the orange being a specific color, when scrap was generated they wanted to maintain a color sort to reclaim the orange colored polymer. However, they had no solution for recovering the plastic from paper lined closures.

A closure manufacturer was not able to reuse scrap closures because of the EVA lining that is adhered to the interior of the cap. In an effort to reuse some of the material, the manufacturer had a company grind and repelletize the EVA lined closures but found the residual EVA caused failure in the white application.

A PET bottle manufacturer generates defect bottles with adhered labels. The labels cannot go back into the melt stream.

A custom profile extrusion manufacturer generated scrap coextruded profiles on a monthly basis. The two polymers, rigid PVC (white) and flexible PVC (black), are not compatible in the melt stream.

A bottle manufacturer accidentally dumped virgin white PET pellets & regrind on top of natural virgin PET pellets & regrind. To further complicate matters, when they drained the silo a portion of the material spilled on the railroad tracks. Color sorting the white PET from the clear PET would make it very difficult to get a good yield, and when you add in the dust, dirt, rocks, wood and other possible debris, the material could have been a total loss.

A multinational custom compounder had four truck loads of black PVC pellets that had been contaminated with white PET pellets (pepper and salt). Had it all been PVC, they would color over the white with the black. But in this case, the white was PET.

A company that sells PCABS needed a solution to fix 120,000 lbs. of material that was blended with ABS. Facing a significant loss in material value, the company was looking for options other than trashing the material or selling “as is” for export.

Receiving material in bulk is a great way to save on material handling and get good buys on material. Unfortunately, at some point it is likely that a truck will hookup to the wrong point, run two incompatible materials, and leave you with a big problem.