PET Bottles Washing Line

For the pre-washing of the PET bottles washing line, we need a little bit of your patience to go through what it means.

Let's make an introduction first:

It is quite important the way PET bottles are cut; this effects the way line will perform, the amount of fines, the amount of PET flakes floating on to of water and some other few things.

Therefore a sharp edge flakes will make the washing line to run much better than a jagged one.

 

All this at the end means blades of granulator should be sharp all the time. Period.

As everybody knows, PET is abrasive by itself, paper isn't less and dirt doesn't help much so how we do it ?

A lot depends, once again, by the way bottles are arriving at the very beginning.

If you operate in a country where it never rains, we do suggest to skip the pre-washing  process all together and put a second granulator so you can switch from one to the other and have the line running 24/7 with no downtime.

Why this ? Because a second dry granulator cost less than the pre-washing, takes less space, consume less energy, is more productive than the wet process, granulator will never rust and all these good things.

After this pre-washing of flakes is much easier, more effective and trouble-free.

But we should be talking about pre-washing, isn't it ?

Because most of countries have rain, snow etc. pretty often and bottles are already wet, most of the times, we do suggest to go with a wet process all the way.

After bales-breaker, so after bottles are in single form, we go into a trammel with continuous hot water spray to detach all labels and get rid of most of them, together with some glue and most of surface dirt.

Keeping water very hot the process has the big advantage to turn PVC bottles opalescent, so way easy to recognize and remove from the PET stream.

More than this, being in a country where electricity doesn't cost a fortune, a second trammel, running with hot air, can get to the point to shrink all bottles, making the average thickness higher and easier to wash, dry etc..

Does this sound good ? Yes it does also because, back to PVC bottles, they will definetly get brown and very easy to recognize and remove.

After all this, your bottles will be pretty clean, shrunk, labels and dirt free and without any PVC content so granulator blades will last very long and its maintenance cost not high at all.

On the other side you should keep in mind that hot water cost a bit and hot air even more so you should run the numbers in the country where you are and see if this is convenient to you.

Each piece of the equipment cost money from investment and operating costs point of view.

 Keep this always in mind.