Recycling uses old waste to come up with new products. The past century evidenced huge recycling of plastics. Traditionally, the recycling processes involve use of a lot of water which is not welcomed. So in the quest to reduce the wastage of water during these processes, Marco Adame, founder of Ak Inovek from Mexico proliferate a new eco-friendly technology that doesn’t require liquids and is having the capability to process materials such as styrofoam, polystyrene and ABS (Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) using the same sort of customizable machinery.
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This technology developed can process more than 90 percent of any type of plastic avoiding water waste and reducing production costs by half; maintaining the quality of pellets (small beads of recycled plastic) by avoiding stages with severe changes in temperature. Marco explained that the traditional type of plastic has the distinction of being hygroscopic (when it comes in contact with water it retains moisture at a molecular level), so it needs to be dehydrated in order to be crystallized involving high temperatures up-to 180 C and then cooling the material with water.
However, the development by AK Inovex performs all these processes without water, so it goes directly to the formation of recycled beads resulting in deduced amount of energy consumption and physical space as the setup is much smaller.Moreover, the quality of pellets is improvised making the recycling process more profitable.
The perk of this technology is its ability to process any sort of plastic , let it be Styrofoam, polystyrene, PET and ABS. The difference lies in the mechanism because there is a special piece for each type of material. The production capacity of plastic beads is currently of two tons and the team is working to bring it up to ten.
In the upcoming years, the company wants to change its business strategy and add an ecological washing machine which uses a special bio-detergent for plastics, which is expected to reduce the cost of operation even more.
Source: Sciencedaily
