We are a member of:
For those of you who find plastics exciting, you can now read about a report in Polymervärlden where Accon GreenTech AB is included in the latest issue, which is number 2. It is especially interesting now that we will soon participate in Plastteknik Nordic, which will start on 10/5 to 11/5.
There is an opportunity to look at a few different options on big bags that are presented on site where we have let the imagination run wild a little to show that we have better opportunities to be creative with rPP.
But back to the report in Polymer world where we want to underline some details that may be good to know.
Why do we want to recycle the material that is in the big bags? It is because it is possible in many cases and that we can reduce the consumption of the earth's resources. A lot of material goes to incineration today, which is a bit unfortunate as much of the material is of high quality and is good for getting back into big bags again.
The challenge we face now is that we see that people may not have really understood that the possibility exists that already today it is possible to order your large bags with rPP. It seems that there is a lot of talk about this, that it is in the future. Accon has already passed that stage, so today we can deliver large bags that contain up to 30% recycled content. We can of course have more than 30% as well, but then it primarily applies to sacks and products that should not carry heavy weights.
An example is hoods that we ourselves use for goods that are in stock. These hoods are a protection from dust that usually moves in the warehouses that we don't want to get on our big bags that are to be delivered to the customer. During storage, we use hoods that we can use several times before they are broken. A hood can be used up to 100 times purely theoretically before it has passed its life cycle in our system. If you compare it with stretch film and top sheet, which are usually used to protect goods, this is more durable.
Ready for recycling RFR is something we want to draw everyone's attention to as this is an ongoing project at Accon. We are working on reviewing the material choices for the big bags so that we do not have different materials that make recycling more or less impossible. We see that this is a rather extensive problem and we can more or less say that the two materials that can go together are PP and PE. If we get a lot of polyester, PVC and ABS, that recycling process will be devastated. This means that we would have to get an entire market to look at this in order for us to avoid problems in the recycling process. For this to work, we need more muscle than we can achieve with RFR. This almost requires a check at the authority level, where you have to report that you have the correct choice of materials in the products. We will refuse large bags that have mixed materials as we cannot recycle the material. It is better that the sacks go to incineration already in step one, then you reduce the Co2 emissions from transports that are to go for materials that then cannot be used anyway.
So what do we do with the material that is recycled and becomes a fine plastic granulate? What is of good quality goes back into our products and we also use the material for our own big bags that Accon GreenTech AB packs in when we have the material ready. We have some major projects going on with customers who will also start switching to rPP in their bags and there is some testing left to do before we can be completely ready to run full series.
We sometimes receive material that can go to our plastic pallets that Accon SRS AB sells, and there the plastic with a slightly higher MFI can be included as filling. We also have a surplus of material that we believe can fit in with injection molding companies that we hope to be able to attract to us at the fair in Malmö. We have also tested some material for 3D printing and it has also worked, but we have not seen any large-scale testing yet. It is also interesting to look at more and we have smaller amounts of material that we can use for tests if anyone is interested.
Then we also want to take the opportunity to inform that we can offer our customers reconditioning of large bags. We need to go back to the late nineties when we saw that this was more interesting at the time. Since then, we have become more comfortable with using disposable bags, which we see today is the most common. Breaking that comfort zone is not easy as you do not have the capacity to fold sacks and press in place with our customers.
Here there is probably an opportunity to develop this through carrots where you get the opportunity to get help with getting started again. Some of our customers are still working on this, but there are certainly more who can develop this. We can help with this service in Accon GreenTech AB so the opportunity exists.
