Extrusion International USA 6-2019

32 Extrusion International 6/2019 EXTRUSION TECHNOLOGY – CASE STUDY During a visit in Bulgaria at the southeastern edge of the European Union a highly professional and well-organized recycling plant was found producing high quality regranulates that can reach or even surpass virgin material levels. It is the family business “Kaskada” founded in 1990 in Tsaratsovo near Plovdiv. In terms of the machine technology used, Kaskada relies predominantly on systems manufactured by Austrian manufacturers (Artec, Erema, MAS). Their different treatment concepts lead to different results. The highest quality in comparison comes from the MAS cascade extrusion line based on the co-rotating conical twin- screw extruder as the central component typical storage areas (see Factbox Kaskada). Everything new, well or- ganized and clean, just a company that emerged only after the turn of 1989 and therefore had no unpro- ductive facilities from the commu- In the industrial zone of Tsaratso- vo, about 8 km west of the city center of Plovdiv, the second larg- est city in Bulgaria, there is a large complex with a row of seven mod- ern industrial halls surrounded by nist central economy to drag on or to get rid of. The company was founded in 1990 by Kostadin Nikolov, the father-in- law of today’s production manager Daniel Nedev as a trading company With the Right Recycling Technology to the Highest Quality Picture 1: The Bulgarian plastics recycling company Kaskada produces in addition to its distribution business with virgin plastic materials around 12,000 tonnes of high-quality recycled plastics a year, most of which is exported to Western Europe (All pictures: Reinhard Bauer) Picture 2: The Kaskada business model is focussed on segregated industrial plastic waste, here at the example of ABS-components from the neighboring refrigerator factory Picture 3: Another processing example of largely uniform industrial waste, e.g. plastic films, of which all types except PET films are processed