Croatian PET recycler Rekis (Donja Dubrava; www.rekis.hr) – result of a merger between Austrian drinks firm Steinrieser (St Gallen; www.steinrieser.com) and Austro-Croatian trading company involved in beverage production KIS pica (Zagreb; www.kis-drinks.hr) – has invested an undisclosed sum to create a PET recycling plant in the Donja Dubrava region of Croatia, capable of producing 18,000 t/y of high-quality rPET pellets from post-consumer plastic bottles.

The collection of plastic bottles in Croatia is managed via an existing deposit system, but also through municipal collection points. Rekis said it also sources collected plastic bottles from Austria, Slovenia, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.

Rekis uses Sesotec’s (Schönberg, Germany; www.sesotec.com) multi-sensor sorting systems to separate plastic bottles and, in a further step, plastic flakes by type. Using Sesotec’s Varisort technology, waste bottles are examined to remove unwanted materials from the material stream to ensure the required grade purity. 

What Rekis calls “undesirable polymers”, such as PVC, polyethylene, and polypropylene, along with coloured PET, bottles with labels or even metals can be reliably detected and rejected. Sorted material is shredded to flakes and then washed. Fine sorting of the PET flakes produced by the shredding process is carried out. Metals, off-coloured material, and undesirable polymer types are again detected and rejected.

Rekis plant manager Filip Hozjan said Sesotec’s multi-sensor sorting systems were at the heart of the facility. “Only reliable and, above all, precise sorting enables us to obtain high-quality, colour and grade-pure rPET that can be further processed into food-grade rPET pellets. These high-purity flakes are used by beverage producers as starting material for the production of new bottles.”

Sesotec has six subsidiaries in Singapore, China, the US, India, Canada, and Thailand.