Starlinger - Press Monitor 2024

To accommodate a wide range of input materials, the entire recycling process can be individually adapted according to the contamination and odor intensity of the input material and the desired specifications of the produced regranulate. The process starts with cutting and homogenizing the input material in the SMART feeder where the material is also heated until it reaches the ideal operating point. Highly volatile odors are extracted already during this process step. After the main extruder the melt passes through continuous melt filters where solid contaminants are removed so that they cannot release odors during the following process steps. In the subsequent C-VAC module the melt surface is increased by 300 %, achieving extremely high degassing efficiency. This ensures that even deeply embedded odors are permanently extracted. In the final step, the produced recycled pellets are treated in the pellet conditioning unit (PCU) at the end of the recycling process to extract the most persistent odors. This ensures permanently odor-improved regranulate that can be used for manufacturing a wide range of plastic products. A Portuguese recycling pioneer The roots of Ambiente S.A. reach back to 1953 when its mother company, the Portuguese plastic film production company Fabrica Leiriense de Plasticos, was already recycling internal production waste. From the early 1970’s on Fabrica Leiriense de Plasticos also processed externally collected plastic waste, including imported materials from other European countries such as Germany, and became Portugal’s recycling pioneer for domestic plastic waste in the 1990’s. The company management’s awareness that plastics recycling constitutes a fundamental prerequisite for a sustainable future led to the foundation of Ambiente S.A. in 1989. Since 2000 it is registered as an independent company, currently employing 36 people and recycling 7000 tons of post-consumer, industrial and domestic waste per year. The produced recycled LDPE and HDPE pellets are suitable for extrusion, blow molding and injection molding applications and are supplied to customers in Europe and Northern Africa.