With rising material costs driving processors to use more recycled plastics, also rising is the risk of contaminated material getting into products and machinery, increasing scrap rates and machinery downtime.
Bunting Magnetics Co. (Booth N4609) of Newton, Kan., which specializes in weeding contaminants from resin batches, has launched a grinder/shredder feed conveyor with metal detector.
The conveyor features a metal-free zone that will detect ferrous and nonferrous metals, said Michael Wilks, Bunting's director of marketing and sales, in a June 19 interview at NPE.
The system also works as a tool to inspect finished parts.
``Large processors with in-house recycling are going to have a major interest in this product,'' Wilks said. So will guys in recycling doing regrinds of purgings.
``This is your first line of defense,'' he said.
Bunting has also launched an entire line of nonmagnetic conveyors. The Move-It Systems-brand conveyors are lightweight, on wheels, and designed specifically for the plastics industry.
``What we've found about the plastics industry is that they like things that are portable,'' Wilks said. ``The conveyors are about moving Bunting further into the plastics industry.''
Another innovation, Wilks said, is Bunting's new machine-mounted metal separators for slow-moving choke-feed applications.
The unit features a slide gate that cuts off the flow of material when ferrous or nonferrous metal contaminants are detected. The chamber is then vacuumed clean into a separate unit, and the material feeding starts again.
The separators are capable of detecting metal particles as small as 0.5 millimeter.