Plastic Washing Line for PET Bottles, Rigid Plastics and Film

No, and roughly half the enquiries we receive do not need it. Hot washing at 85 to 95 degrees with 1 to 3 percent detergent is required when the contaminant is bonded to the surface: label glue, beverage residue, oil or fat. Where the dirt is merely sitting on the surface, cold washing plus friction washing achieves the same result without heating water every hour of every shift.

Make-up water runs roughly 4 to 15 cubic metres per hour across our capacity range, depending on how dirty the input is. That is consumption with recirculation running, not total circulating flow. Most water is recovered through settling and filtration, so what you actually lose is evaporation plus what leaves with the sludge.

Yes, and it should be. Settling tanks plus filtration return most of the water to the line. How far you take it depends on local discharge rules more than on the process, so tell us your regulations and we will size water treatment together with the line rather than bolting it on afterwards.

No. Washed and dried flake is a saleable product, and stopping there removes the most expensive block from the investment. Pelletize when your buyers need resin rather than flake, or when the local price gap between flake and pellet is wide enough to fund the extrusion section. Many plants sell flake for a year first, then add pelletizing once feedstock and buyers are proven.

By three different mechanisms, which is why a PET line has three separate stages. A label remover takes off the sleeve mechanically before crushing. Density separation in the sink-float tank removes PP and PE caps, because they float while PET sinks. Hot washing releases the adhesive residue that the first two leave behind.

Not by density in a washing line, because their densities are too close. This is a real technical boundary and worth being blunt about: PVC in a PET stream has to be removed before washing, by manual sorting or by optical or X-ray sorting equipment. If PVC reaches the extruder it degrades and discolours the whole batch. Any supplier telling you a washing line sorts PVC out of PET is overselling it.

With a pre-washing stage before the main line, plus grit removal, and a realistic wear budget. Soil is abrasive, so it attacks knives and pump impellers rather than simply washing away. It also loads the water treatment heavily. This is the most demanding washing application we quote, and it is one where a trial run on your actual material is worth the shipping cost.

From about 300 square metres at 200 to 500 kg/h up to about 800 square metres at 1,000 to 2,000 kg/h, with 2 to 5 operators per shift over the same range. Installed power runs from roughly 100 kW to 250 kW. Check the floor area first: if the building is too small, capacity is irrelevant.

Below 1 percent on rigid flake, out of centrifugal dewatering followed by hot-air drying. Film is harder because it holds water in its folds, which is why film lines use a squeezer rather than relying on a centrifugal dryer alone. Residual moisture is the single most common reason pelletizing runs unstably.

A full line runs in this order: bale opening or feeding, pre-wash to take off stones and loose soil, size reduction, sink-float separation by density, hot washing at 85 to 95 °C with 1 to 3% alkali where glue or oil is present, friction washing to scrub off what is stuck, rinsing, then mechanical dewatering and thermal drying. Not every stream needs every stage. Clean material can skip hot washing entirely, while soil-heavy film may need pre-washing and squeezing that a PET line does not.