Recycling Tech Roundup: CarbonLite, Covestro, LKM Recycling, Johnson Controls, Aqua Metals

Here are some of the recycling technology announcements we’re following this week.

Plastic bottle recycler CarbonLite Industries, whose customers include Nestle Waters North America and Pepsico, has begun construction on a $62 million PET recycling facility in Dallas, Plastics News reports.

Nestle has two bottling plants in Dallas, which is one of the reasons the company decided to locate the new recycling plant in that city.

The CarbonLite facility, expected to come online in the second quarter of this year, will be able to recycle about 100 million pounds of post-consumer PET bottles per year into pellets, which can be used to make more PET bottles. It will double CarbonLite’s annual capacity of food-grade PET to 200 million pounds.

The company says the Dallas plant will make it the world’s largest producer of food-grade PET resin derived from post-consumer beverage containers.

UK waste management company LKM Recycling has installed UNTHA’s largest four shaft shredder that will allow it to process an array of materials including aluminum, tires and uPVC windows.

LKM expects the product to increase its annual recycling volumes by up to 25 percent, making it more profitable to process a wider range of materials.

“By shredding and screening uPVC windows, for instance, we’ll be able to separate the ‘waste’ into its component parts with ease,” said LKM’s managing director Tony Hughes in a statement. “This means more material going back into the industry for reprocessing, and more revenue yield for our business.”

UNTHA says its RS150 can achieve throughputs of up to 12 metric tons per hour and its quick-change screens will achieve flexible homogenous particle sizing as small as 30mm.

In other recycling technology news, Covestro says it is moving forward with producing carbon-fiber-reinforced polycarbonate and polyurethane feedstocks based on carbon dioxide.

“These two things are in the early phases, but we’re very excited about them,” board member Klaus Schaefer told Plastics News.

Carbon fiber PC has applications in IT, telecommunications, next-generation phones, laptops and tablets, Schaefer said. In the automotive sector, the material’s advanced mechanical properties mean it can be used as a replacement for metal in exterior parts.

Covestro opened its first commercial-scale plant to produce PU feedstock polyols from CO2 in June, at its Dormagen, Germany, site. The 11 million pound-per-year capacity plant can make polyols that contain up to 20 percent CO2.

And finally, as we reported yesterday, Johnson Controls has acquired just under 5 percent of Aqua Metals outstanding shares, in a deal that will allow the world’s largest automotive battery manufacturer to expand its production using Aqua Metals’ recycling technology. Aqua Metals uses a water-based process to recycle 99 percent of the lead from used lead-acid batteries.