Erema: ‘Another life for plastic, because we care'

At K 2022, evidence of the importance of the circular economy and the prominent role of the recycling industry therein are everywhere. One of the most important players in that industry is the Erema Group.

Sustainable Plastics walked and talked with Manfred Hackl, CEO of the Erema Group, who pointed to the technical advances, including 70 products in the Circonomic Center alone, being showcased by Erema at K 2022. "It's this technical progress — and working together in the value chain — that make it possible to implement a circular economy," he said.

This year at K is the first time Erema Group is presenting itself as a cohesive whole, with all the companies in the group exhibiting together at a single shared stand. "The time was right," Hackl said. "Together, the companies can present the entire portfolio to the customer and the market. Customers recognize Erema but had no idea that we also had, for example, Keycycle for plant engineering or Umac for used machines. One stand makes it easier to present the value of the group, the different products and the different business models to the market."

In addition to a joint stand, just as at previous shows, Erema has also installed an impressive lineup of machinery at the Circonomic Center, which is located outside on the fairgrounds. Here the company is displaying a number of collaborative projects next to providing live recycling demonstrations on a daily basis. The company hopes to recycle some 20,000 tonnes of plastics waste at the show, turning this into regranulate that will be supplied to customers.

One surprising addition to the exhibits at the Circonomic Center are the products from Plasticpreneur, the startup in which Erema recently acquired a stake. Its back-to-basics mobile recycling solutions have been designed for entry-level access to plastics recycling and are deployed in settings varying from universities, schools and science centers to museums and design studios, as well as regions in the world lacking recycling infrastructure.

"It's decentralized recycling," Hackl said. "These machines make recycling available in areas where central recycling is not feasible. They are small-scale solutions towards making plastics circular."

At K 2022, the six companies that make up the Erema Group — Erema, Pure Loop, Umac, 3s, Keycycle and Plasmac — are presenting their technological innovations and services under the motto 'Another life for plastic. Because we care.'

"We care about creating a greener world through plastics recycling, to move this forward and to lessen the chance that the plastic will end up in the environment and to clean up the environment and to reprocess used plastic into a new product. It's these values that drive us as a company to innovate — together we are a strong team for you as a customer, but also for the environment."

According to Hackl, plastics consumption will only continue to rise in the future. "That won't change," he said. "What will change is that the virgin supply will not increase as fast as demand, which makes implementing recycling technology essential. It is our task to provide the right quality of recyclate for the right application."

It is also why the Erema Group has invested more than €100 million in facilities over the past five years; in order to continue to keep pace with developments in the market, new technology must be available that is aligned with these developments.

That is not to say that Erema has not been affected by the ongoing shortages of materials, inflation and soaring energy costs.

"These have affected Erema strongly," said Hackl. "From one week to the next, the supply chain stopped functioning — parts were no longer available that had always been delivered regularly on time; and that's even despite the fact that we have a regional supply chain — one that is in a radius of, say, 500 kilometers around Austria. We have still been quite heavily impacted."

He noted that energy costs were more of an indirect problem, affecting Erema Group's customers rather than the recycling machinery manufacturer itself. "We are an assembling company, not a production company, although the cost of components has also gone up."

Will this affect the progress to the circular economy? Yes, in the short term, said Hackl. "What I mean by the short term is six to 12 months, maybe a little longer. And I think the slowdown will be in Europe, not in the U.S. or Asia. Globalwise, it will continue, but in Europe, the economic situation is making it difficult. We've seen difficult times before, and they last for a while, but we get through."

In the long term, Hackl's vision is of a world in 2030 where circularity is reality, where plastic will no longer have a negative connotation but will instead be regarded in the same way as paper, metal or glass. "We need plastic, also simply it has a quite low CO2 consumption in comparison to other alternatives. We must get to a situation where everyone is happy to use plastic without a 'bad' feeling — because it is disposed of correctly and recycled. Just like glass and paper."

The focus of the group's trade show presentation is on new recycling systems and components — in total seven — to meet a wide range of customer needs and quality specifications.

In a notable step, Erema has also launched technology aimed at the chemical recycling process. Chemarema, as the new series is called, has been developed for mechanical material processing as part of the chemical recycling process, according to Hackl. Mechanical processes are often at the beginning of the process chain for chemical recycling to prepare input streams and ensure a reliable, continuous and energy-efficient flow of feed material, he explained. Chemarema features extrusion technology that has been precisely tailored for downstream chemical processes.

Erema is also launching EcoGentle, a new plasticizing technology for its large Vacurema PET recycling systems that allows higher throughputs of up to 6 tonnes per hour at lower temperatures and about a 10 percent lower energy consumption. This is achieved through the further optimization of a number of design and rheological factors, with a result of particularly homogeneous melt and a wider process window. The lower temperature allows the melt to be processed more gently overall, producing higher-quality recycled PET pellets.

Currently, the company's focus with its large-scale plants is on PET recycling. However, Erema is also working on similarly upscaling the technologies for polyolefin recycling to achieve high throughput volumes.

For highly contaminated post-consumer materials, Erema is also launching the new Intarema TVEplus DuaFil Compact double filtration machine, which, compared with the previous Erema double filtration solution, is more compactly designed and achieves a melt temperature upstream of the second filter unit that is 18.5° C lower, thus also reducing the energy consumption.

In addition, Erema's Powerfil business has developed a new Laserfilter 406 with a 50 percent larger screen area that can handle the larger throughputs: up to 9,000 kilograms of melt can be filtered per hour with the Quattro version of the new filter.

3S is presenting a new type of cylinder that enables ultrasonic wear measurement of the extrusion screw and cylinder while the machine is running, eliminating the need to shut down, remove and reinstall the parts, which would usually mean one to two days of machine downtime.

Umac, the company specializing in refurbishing and selling used machines, is also launching a new activity at K. Called Readymac, it is a standardized, prefabricated recycling solution that can be produced from stock and can handle many standard applications in the post-consumer recycling segment, providing a good option for customers that need a recycling solution at short notice without custom configuration.

Live demonstrations of the machines in the in-house recycling segment from Pure Loop and Plasmac are being shown at the Erema Group stand in Hall 9, where Keycycle will also be showcasing a new deinking solution for recycling printed film that enables printing ink to be removed in a process step upstream of extrusion.

Next to all the new hardware, Erema is also presenting new software in Düsseldorf, Germany. The company is launching PredictOn:Drive, a predictive maintenance application for its recycling machines. The app can be used to monitor the condition of the main drivetrains and vacuum pumps during operation to predict when maintenance needs to be performed next, thus improving scheduling, shortening downtimes and lowering costs.

The data is made available in the BluPort digital customer platform, which bundles all digital assistance systems. The platform can be accessed via PC and mobile devices and offers a comprehensive suite of service and data visualization apps that help plant operators control quality and improve machine performance.