DETROIT - The American Plastics council has plans for a new, state-of-the-art recycling research center in Berkeley, Calif. APC, at the Society of Automotive Engineers International Congress and Exposition, held Feb 27 - March 2 in Detroit, also featured a new instrument for identifying scrap plastics types.
The West Coast project is being done with MBA Polymers Inc. of Berkeley. President Michael B. Biddle said an APC grant will go toward construction of a 10,000-square-foot facility with a recycling pilot line. The goal is to develop new technologies for identifying and separating plastics from the automotive, appliance, computer and comsumer electronic industries.
Neither Biddle nor APC would disclose the size of the grant.
The center is to begin operating in April. It will complement another APC-supported recycling site in Boston, said Jerry L. Fosnaugh, chairman of APC's automotive committee and environmental business development director at Dow Plastics in Midland, Mich.
The polot line will include a size-reduction operation, a three-stage air classification system and a wet grinding system. A sereis of separation systems will remove remaining foreign material and separate plastics by density, a process APC believes will be much faster than conventional sink-float methods.
The new plastics identification instrument is made by Bruker Instruments Inc. of Billerics, Mass. The device employs infrared spectrometry to identify 23 types of plastics. Called the P/ID 28, the $50,000 machine can identify black plastics, something other infared devices are not able to do, according to APC.
In a press showing, samples were identified in less than five seconds.
