PET Bottle Washing Line

Our complete PET bottle washing line  is the ideal solution for anyone wishing to start or improve their plastic bottle recycling business. This fully automated, turnkey solution processes baled PET bottles into contamination-free PET flakes. These plastic flakes can be sold at high prices to polyester staple fibre manufacturers or made into pellets for the manufacture of other PET products.

While our standard PET bottle washing line is sufficient for most facilities, customised setups with additional machines and larger capacities can be designed to suit your specific needs.

Working principles

Our turnkey PET bottle washing line consists of our range of plastic recycling machines which are connected using various types of conveyor systems.

Unpackers: The first step in our plastic bottle cleaning line is to break up the compacted PET bales into a free-flowing stream. Once the large bales have been "broken", the bottles are free to move to the next machine.

Tumbler screen: An optional piece of equipment, the tumbler screen is a slowly rotating tunnel lined with small holes. These holes are slightly smaller than the PET bottles, so that small pieces of contamination (e.g. glass, metal, rock/dirt, paper etc.) can fall out when the PET bottles are moved to the next machine.

Wet plastic pelletizer: sometimes called a plastic crusher, our plastic pelletizer cuts PET bottles into small 10-15 mm sized flakes. With a constant spray of water into the cutting chamber, this wet granulation process pre-treats and partially cleans the material before transferring it to the next machine.

Air Classifier: Air classification is a method of separating lighter materials from heavier materials. The main purpose of using an air classifier is to remove contaminants such as paper, cardboard and plastic labels from PET flakes.

Sink/float separation tank: Water is used as a medium to separate the floating material from the sinking material. In the case of plastic bottle recycling, the PET plastic sinks while the plastic film (bottle labels) and PP/PE plastic (bottle caps) float. A screw conveyor at the bottom of the sink and float separation tank moves the PET plastic to the next machine.

Hot wash system: Hot washing PET flakes is of higher value as the process dissolves the glue (used to adhere the label to the bottle) and any remaining drinks/foodstuffs that are difficult to remove in the cold wash process. Although you can use only water in a hot water washing system, adding detergent will give better results.

Friction washer: An efficient cold water washing machine, the high speed friction washer uses friction as a mechanical way to remove any hard to remove dirt and debris from PET flakes.

Dehydrator: The first step in the drying process, our centrifugal dehydrator uses centrifugal force to remove most of the water from the PET flakes before they are fed into our hot dryer.

Hot dryer: The PET flakes are evacuated from the dehydrator into the hot dryer, where they travel along a series of stainless steel tubes mixed with hot air. This process removes any residual moisture through dewatering. An attached cyclone mixes the PET flakes with cold air in preparation for storage in a product silo.

Product silo: storage tank for clean, dry PET flakes.

Pelletizer/Extruder: In most cases, PET flakes are used especially for the manufacture of polyester fibres. However, we do have customers who require plastic pelletizers, such as our single-screw extrusion pelletizers and twin-screw extrusion pelletizers.