It’s the first day of the 2011 Resources Recycling Industry Exhibition. I woke up early, hopped onto the subway line 1, exited the Caobao Road (exit door 1), made a left, and walked about 5 minutes to the Shanghai Everbright Exhibition Center (East Hall). After a painless registration process which requires a business card showing you’re in the recycling industry, I was in with a yellow registration tag dangling around my neck.

It’s 9:30 AM and most of the exhibitionists were still setting up their booths. At the entrance, the exhibitors were greeting visitors with a smile and passing out company brochures. They were eager to make the most of their exhibition fees.

All in all, while I didn’t see anything super innovative, I had a wonderful time chatting with some of the companies which ranged from plastic scrap suppliers/buyers to plastic recycling machinery technicians (pelletizers, washing lines, shredders/crushers/granulators, etc…). There were also companies in the rubber recycling industry sharing their developments.

As I’m in the market for a LDPE washing/pelletizing line, I spent most of my time speaking with the technicians at the recycling machinery booths, which were mostly from the Zhangjiagang/Jiangsu area. The companies offered fully automated lines run by conveyor belts with prices between 100K-200K USD. While you would think a machine of this value would at least offer a 5-10 year warranty, the standard warranty is only 1 year. What does that tell you about quality? After the one year period, repair costs will be charged “at cost”.

I also met several suppliers/buyers of plastic scrap that I had wonderful conversations with. Again, while I didn’t learn or see anything innovation, it’s always a pleasure meeting new friends in the plastic recycling industry.

I was in Ningbo (Zhejiang Province) several days ago to visit a friend that recently purchased a TiTech Optical Sorter. Basically, the machine uses a conveyor belt to drive shredded plastic pieces under an optical sensor which then uses an air-jet to pick or “shoot” out the desired plastic type. While the optical sorter can only pick out 1 plastic type at a time, it’s able to separate a wide variety of plastic scrap including ABS, ABS/PC, HIPS, PS, PET, PETG, PVC, PP, etc…

This is definitely a step up from the manual separation of e-scrap plastics, however, the machine has many limitations:

1. The plastic you feed into the conveyor needs to be around 3-5cm.
2. It takes 2-3 passes before the plastic is completely sorted.
3. The sorter is not very sensitive to black or dark pieces.
4. The regrinds need to be clean or relatively clean.

One of the largest issues with plastic recycling is sorting by plastic type. If we can perfect this technology, it would make the recycling of plastic a much simpler process which will lead to the increase of plastics recycled.