The Remondis group has commissioned a new plastics recycling facility in Taiwan. Located in Fangyuan, on the west coast of the island, the plant will replace an older site in Nantou in central Taiwan, which has been operated by a subsidiary of Germany's largest waste management company for almost 30 years. The group reported having invested about €50m in the facility, which will be able to process about 45,000 tonnes of plastic waste collected from households each year. Previously released information indicates that the Nantou site had an annual capacity of roughly 25,000 tonnes.
According to Remondis, the new facility uses modern near-infrared (NIR) sorting technology enabling the company to produce recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) pellets" It also reduces the amount of manual sorting required while significantly improving quality.
The facility also had an automated real-time monitoring system that provided data about material, water, energy and chemicals and could integrate AI in the future, Remondis said. To maximise the efficiency and sustainability of the plant, the company reported that it had also entered into a partnership with the neighbouring PET and fibre manufacturer LeaLea. The companies' production facilities will share steam generation and wastewater treatment systems.
"The biggest change is certainly the extrusion technology that we now have that enables us to reprocess PET, PE and PP ourselves," Remondis added. The ability to produce standardised recycled pellet out of previously sorted plastic fractions meant that Remondis brought another element of the value chain inhouse. Remondis reported that these recycled plastics were in strong demand in Taiwan. The country’s textile industry focused on using recycled PET (rPET), for instance to make sports clothing.
Along with running the plastic recycling plant, Remondis said that it was operating a pilot facility to process organic waste in Taiwan. Additionally, the company was building a power station running on refuse-derived fuel (RDF) close to the new sorting and recycling facility. Once all the projects are integrated, the mix of CO2-reduced fuel (RDF), green electricity from photovoltaic panels and bioenergy meant that Remondis would be able to produce CO2-neutral recycled plastic pellets in the future.
