Coextruded PET Preforms Nylon Barrier Liberated – Both Plastics Recovered
Problem / Opportunity:
We were approached to find a way to separate Nylon from PET to recover PET. Bottle preforms can be coextruded with a Nylon barrier (above) sandwiched between two layers of PET. Our customer (another recycler/scrap buyer) was forced to take these along with more salable scrap PET resin when they won the bid on clean PET scrap – yet no market existed for the PET Nylon preforms.
Impact on Customer:
The options available to the customer were as follows:
- trash the material,
- continue to accumulate and incur storage costs, or
- export the material “as is”, provided they could find a buyer.
Based upon these options, the customer would incur significant losses compared to being able to sell the PET which was previously thought to be “unrecoverable”.
Solution for Customer:
Pre-shipment sampling confirmed that the nylon and PET could be separated with favorable economics. Using proprietary separation processes, Butler-MacDonald was able to liberate the nylon from the PET and then achieve separation from the desired PET fraction.
Benefit:
Butler-MacDonald delivered a PET yield and purity acceptable to the customer’s client, which resulted in the use of the material as originally intended, at the original sale price.
