Bausano, with its extruders, participates in the field of mechanical recycling of mixed PVC waste from the construction industry. PVC circularity is not a priority exclusive to Bausano, but we are talking about a European priority and one that has no viable alternatives. This leads the entire supply chain to progress toward PVC circularity and in the promotion of products made from recycled materials. Bausano knows the urgency and importance of developing extrusion lines that contribute value to PVC recovery and circularity.
Recycling and construction are key words that led Bausano to the development of an eco-innovative and technically scalable research project on an industrial scale for the mechanical recycling of PVC production waste.
Project objectives and results obtained
The recycling process involved post-industrial PVC scrap of mixed rigid/plasticized type inseparable as constituting co-extruded profiles, e.g., gaskets for window and door frames. The end application is to re-extrude the same product or other similar products.
The production process of co-extruding gaskets
Rigid/flexible PVC generates large amounts of scrap - e.g., bleed-off due to material or color change, defective profiles - amounting to about 12 percent of production. This type of waste has in the past never been the focus of any form of recycling, but usually destined for landfill, with disposal costs ranging from €2.0-2.5/kg and in some cases even higher. The technological challenge for Bausano, and the plastics sector, has been precisely to recycle such mixed waste, as processing waste consisting of a single type of material, from other production lines such as mono-extruded profiles and molded accessories, were already being recovered and fed back into production, mixed with virgin PVC.
The goal was achieved through the development of a process of mechanical recycling optimized in relation to the type of scrap to be processed. The goal of this process is to obtain products with performance comparable to those made exclusively from virgin material. This allows these products to be offered on the market, with a highly competitive advantage resulting can then be offered on the market with the added value of being produced by a recycling process.
Development of recycled material and identification of possible applications
In the preliminary project activities, the starting materials, namely virgin rigid and flexible PVC compounds used in co-extruded profiles, were analyzed. The main technical critical issue to be addressed in the development of the recycling process is that rigid and flexible PVC have very different rheological profiles and thus very different processing temperatures so a window of process parameters must be found to ensure effective blending of the two types of material without incurring polymer degradation as a result of high temperatures. In order to develop a recycling compound with homogeneous characteristics suitable for the applications of interest, in terms of performance and aesthetic finish, the following objectives were pursued by Bausano:
- optimization of the process of dimensional reduction of the waste;
- formulation optimization of the mixture, through the addition of appropriate additives;
- optimization of extrusion process parameters to reduce thermal degradation effects, while ensuring optimal blending of the two types of PVC.
A series of compounds were then extruded, with varying composition, first on a laboratory scale, with our MD30 laboratory extruder, to study feasibility and extrudability.
Subsequently, the formulations and related process parameters that yielded the most promising results were replicated on an industrial scale on our MD Nextmover Twin-screw extruder for Regranulation of PVC.
On all the compounds produced, both on laboratory extruder and on twin-screw, they were to evaluate the homogeneity of mixing, demonstrate the technical replicability of the recycling process on an industrial scale, define its optimal operating parameters, and determine the technical characteristics of the element produced from the new recycling material.
Therefore, some potential applications have been identified for the compound from mixed recycling, possibly with the addition of rigid or flexible virgin material needed to achieve the level of hardness required by the application of interest. Possible applications of the pellets extruded from post-industrial waste can be pipes, profiles or the initial co - extruded product itself that produced the waste.
For virgin PVC-based applications, the percentage of recycled material used was above 60 percent, which is the lower limit of recycled plastic use to produce products certified as "recycled" by continuous extrusion process. It should be noted that this percentage represented a target particularly ambitious from a technical point of view, given the heterogeneity of the characteristics of PVC waste.
In the final phase of the project, the following was physically fabricated each of the identified components with the developed recycling compounds in order to compare their performance with similar specimen made from virgin material.
Co-Extruded Gasket
For the production of the rigid part of the co-extruded gasket, according to the defined hardness target (ShD), the compounds used are from recyclates added with virgin rigid PVC.
The gasket produced under the optimum conditions, in terms of extrusion parameters and starting compound, meets the minimum requirements for hardness and dimensional stability to fit properly into the intended housing for the final application (these are gaskets for gates).
The surface finish is comparable to that of the same component produced from virgin PVC.
Single-extruded rod
For the manufacture of this component, according to the target defined hardness, up to 80 ShA, the recycled compounds with added flexible rigid PVC were used . The rod produced under the optimum conditions, in terms of extrusion parameters and starting compound, meets the minimum requirements for hardness and dimensional stability to fit properly into the intended housing for the final application, and performs even better than the corresponding virgin material due to the slightly higher average hardness obtained.
The performance required of the tubular component is that it does not leak out of its housing as a result of a pulling stress, either caused by tensioning the sheet or by wind.
This eventuality is due to both the deformability of the constituent material and the geometry of the component, since it is a hollow profile. A specially designed test was carried out in this case that exactly simulates the described stress. The aesthetic performance is indistinguishable from that of the extruded tubular with virgin flexible PVC.
Conclusions and future developments
The development of the closed-loop PVC recycling process developed by Bausano has produced as its main results the generation of concrete research and development data that can be applied to our customers. They in turn will have many advantages in taking the path of recycling with a Bausano Extruder, even in this historical time of raw material shortage:
- A lower environmental impact, thanks to a drastic reduction in production waste sent to landfills and the use of virgin raw materials from non-renewable fossil resources, partially replaced with secondary raw material;
- Significant economic savings, to the extent that the company will see an immediate reduction in both the expense item related to the disposal operations of its production waste, previously, and the cost and difficulty of purchasing raw material.
- The possibility of applying our energy-saving systems to a PVC recycling process through induction heating of the cylinder, allowing further cost savings and environmental protection.
- The possibility of monitoring all production parameters through our Industry 4.0, Orquestra IoT system.
The use of PVC from recycling, with or without the addition of virgin PVC, for new productions different from those currently in place, may be evaluated as a further future development in order to expand the range of products offered by Bausano.
