Food-grade PET recycling system for Vietnam

Vietnam – Bepex International – a process developer for the food, chemicals, minerals and polymer industries – is to install the first of its new line of BePET bottle recycling systems in Vietnam, thereby enabling the Ho Chi Minh City-based Than Tai Gas Group to recycle up to 1.5 billion PET bottles per year.

The system is said to allow the processing plant operator to control both decontamination of the plastic and product intrinsic viscosity at the same time and in solid form. (Intrinsic viscosity is a measure of the strength of the plastic polymer which determines how the resulting plastic can be used.) Bepex International’s President and CEO Ralph Imholte comments: ‘Our new system can help the industry move towards greater sustainability by making the resulting recycled PET flake more cost-effective and usable in more ways than other current PET recycling systems offer.’

Mr Hieu, the owner of Thanh Tai Gas, says: ‘BePET is designed to conduct flake-to-flake recycling for bottle-to-bottle applications while still allowing extreme flexibility to produce product suitable for other applications such as fibre or carpet.’ The first line of the FDA-approved system for Thanh Tai is scheduled to be fully operational by January 2012, with a second line to be installed in order to expand capacity to produce different plastics for a variety of applications, especially for the food packing industry.