ONCE the site of the world’s largest coal mine, the German city of Essen has managed to redeem its former reputation as a coal and industrial powerhouse.
In 2017, this city – some 145km from Germany’s northern border and with a population of over 500,000 – was chosen the European Green Capital, and according to official statistics, is now the greenest city in the North Rhine-Westphalia region as well as the third greenest city in Germany.
It was only fitting then for Essen to host the Plastics Recycling World Exhibition, a two-day international trade show for all things plastic and all things recycling. Organised by AMI, a leading provider of market information and events for the global plastics industry, the trade show held in the Messe Essen exhibition centre on June 14 and 15, 2023, showcased over 200 exhibitors, including manufacturers of plastic recycling machinery and equipment, as well as suppliers of materials, additives and services.
It also featured technical presentations and talks by experts as well as two other exhibitions, the Compounding World Expo and the Polymer Testing World Expo, running concurrently.
Also worrying are microplastics, which is plastic broken into very tiny fragments, that have made their way into the oceans and are being ingested by marine life such as fish, sea turtles and crustaceans – which humans, in turn, feed on.
Plastic waste is also a sensitive matter in Malaysia. According to a 2019 WWF-Malaysia study, this country has an annual per capita plastic use of 16.78kg per person. This places Malaysia in second place globally in overall generated plastic waste.
Post-consumer plastic waste generation was estimated to be over one million tonnes in 2016, enough to fill up some 76,500 garbage trucks.
However, for Lindner Washtech sales director Marcel Willberg, plastic’s negative image among environmentalists and conservationists is ill-deserved. Lindner Washtech manufactures plastic waste recycling machines and systems.
“The image must be changed because plastics [by itself] is not bad,” he says in an interview during a visit by members of a Malaysian delegation to the trade show that includes this writer.
Willberg was replying to a question on whether better technology in the recycling and manufacturing of plastics could alter the perception environmentalists have of it.
Plastics’ image is negative, he points out, because it often ends up in rivers and the sea.
“Who’s responsible for this? The people themselves. This mentality has to be changed,” he says, adding that people have to stop throwing things out and instead collect them for recycling or reuse.
“Of course, each country has to develop its own collecting system,” he says, adding that there must be proper laws in place for these.
“We cannot live without plastic, so many things are made of plastic, but the mentality has to be changed,” he stresses.
Giving an example, Willberg says carbon emissions are discharged in the production of both plastic and paper bags.
“You can use a paper bag three or four times, then it gets destroyed. But for a plastic bag, you can reuse and then recycle it in a proper way, but first of all we have to prepare a collection system for that,” he explains.
Many types of plastic, such as LDPE (low density polyethylene), which is used to manufacture containers and squeeze bottles, and PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles are recyclable, points out Willberg.
What’s important for the process is to come up with something high quality and valuable made out of used plastic is the initial sorting and separation of materials. The sorting, adds Willberg, can be done manually but there are already some solutions in the market in which the type and colour of used plastic are detected by machines for sorting.
Erema application sales manager Roland Koch says that his company’s process is capable of handling the recycling of almost all types of plastics.
“Of course, PVC is always a bit difficult,” he admits.
The company even has solutions to remove odour from the used plastics it recycles, such as plastic used as food and cosmetics containers; it can also handle a mixture of waste plastics.
“But if you put in a mixture, you will get a mixture out, which will have different properties than the raw material – for example, different melting points,” he explains, adding that it is still possible, however, to make things like plastic chairs out of such mixed pellets.
“I think the most advanced, in terms of quality, is PET today,” he says.
Erema, which has been recycling plastics for 40 years, has over 7,000 systems installed, mainly in Europe and also in Malaysia.
The recycling process for used plastics begins with the sorting of the materials – usually manually but more and more by high-tech machines – according to colour and type.
This is then followed by washing to decontaminate before shredding into flakes or forming into pellets. The flakes and pellets can then be moulded into new products.
In 2022, the global plastics recycling industry was reportedly estimated to be worth over US$46bil (RM214bil).
However, industry players are facing various challenges, not least of which is the drop in the price of granules for virgin plastics, limited market demand, and a hike in operation costs caused by inflation.
Another of the exhibitors at the trade show, Hiroyuki Industries (M) Sdn Bhd, says it faces a challenge in the collection of materials for recycling in Malaysia.
The Johor-based company is capable of recycling up to 550 million post-consumer plastic bottles and transforming them into, among others, food grade recycled PET or R-PET resins, according to its website.
R-PET resins can be used by beverage companies to make other bottles and recycled multiple times, says the company’s public affairs and sustainability promoting manager Katsuko Takayanagi.
Hiroyuki, which bills itself as a “bottle to bottle” recycling company, has three plants at its site in Senai, Johor, including one for an automated washing line.
Takayanagi says in Japan, for example, there is already a system in place, beginning with the segregation of trash.
“But this is not trash, it’s a resource for us. In Japan, we have to segregate trash according to plastic, bottle or can, it’s already in our culture.
“But not yet in Malaysia,” she admits, adding that the situation is the same in Singapore – the company collects PET bottles from the island state as well.
It was reported that in 2022, Malaysia had a recycling rate of 33.17%, with the total amount of recycled goods reaching 4.63 million tonnes.
This is an improvement from 10.5% back in 2015. Malaysia is hoping to achieve a 40% recycling rate by 2025, according to the government.
In 2021, Hiroyuki launched an educational project with some 60 schools in Johor on recycling.
Another challenge for the company is that many of the bottles sent for recycling in Malaysia are not clean.
“In Japan, we can get clean bottles but [in Malaysia, the bottles are] still very dirty,” says Takayanagi.
“Of course, we have a washing line to clean up but sometimes, it’s still dirty so it’s not used for bottle-to-bottle.
“That’s why for a better environment, a proper collection system [for PET bottles] is very important,” she says.
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