UnloaderGrinderExtruderCutterDehydratorSource: Mitsui Chemicals, Inc.Fillingfilling, and shipping.The annual processing capacity of the deinking facility is approximately 400 tons. All four processes, includ-ing the take-out shaft, washing tank, drying furnace, and take-up shaft, are performed in a roll-to-roll. The washing tank is filled with a washing solution to remove ink, and the ink on the un-rolled film is removed here before be-ing passed through the drying furnace and rewound.The recycled granulation facility has an annual processing capacity of approximately 1,200 tons. It has sev-en processes: roll feeder, grinder, ex-truder, cutter, dehydrator, and filling. It is completed by filling the transparent pellets into flexible container bags. There is also an end material feed port next to the roll feeder, where off-spec-ification waste film, such as plain, nar-row, and 100m-long film, can be re-moved from the core and directly fed into the grinder.Willing to develop cleaning agentsStep 1 of the demonstration experi-ment started smoothly, but there are issues with deinking.Mr. Koji Masusaka said, “Some inks can be removed cleanly, but others are difficult to be removed. Some inks are clearly not removed from the film after processing, while others are transpar-ent at first glance, but when the film is rewound, it is slightly colored.”The key is how to improve the sys-tem so that it can handle a wide variety of inks. For inks that are difficult to be removed, even if the deinking process is repeated two or three times, the ink will not be removed, and the compa-ny knows that the compatibility of the cleaning agent is important. Then, it will be optimizing the deinking equip-ment and conditions as well as devel-oping a new deinking agent by itself.Commercialization is scheduled for 2024The amount of waste film to be pro-cessed in the first year is expected to be several dozen to a hundred tons. The company plans to manufacture recycled film using granulated pellets at Mitsui Chemicals Tohcello, Inc., a group company. The company plans to complete a prototype of the recycled film by the end of 2022, ship samples in 2023, and commercialize the prod-uct in 2024. “Before then, we need to prepare how to ensure hygiene as food packaging, quality control, and trace-ability. We hope to move ahead with these measures at a rapid pace over the next two years,” said Sato.The company plans to promote the fact that the recycled film is manufac-tured by RePLAYER. Prices are ex-pected to be higher than for films made from virgin raw materials. “The Plastic Resource Recycling Strategy sets the following milestones for plastic con-tainers and packaging: by 2025, the design should be reusable and recy-clable; by 2030, 60% of containers and packaging should be recycled and re-used; and by 2035, 100% of used plas-tic should be effectively utilized. The milestones are to be achieved by 2035. We believe that this is a price that will be well accepted once this policy is widespread in the industry,” Sato said.Chemical recycling through in-house collaboration is also in the workAs for the future, the company plans to commercialize Step 2 by 2027, and Step 3 is currently undecided. “Step 3 is for post-consumer film waste, which will be collected and sorted together with waste,” said Masusaka. The Min-istry of Health, Labor, and Welfare’s guidelines on recycled plastic materi-als also rank it low as a material, and the bar for proving its safety is also higher. We believe that chemical recy-cling can reset problems such as san-itation and contamination. We have a department within the company that is working on the commercialization of chemical recycling, and we are consid-ering internal collaboration,” he said.Schematic diagram of reclaimed granulation equipment33
元のページ ../index.html#35