Plastic has been given a very bad image in recent years due to the increasing pollution of the oceans and improper disposal. But you can’t do without it and if you look closely, plastic is a great product – you just have to handle it properly. Wherever waste cannot be avoided, it must be seen as a valuable raw material and put into a recycling loop. Thus, the goal at General-Industries Deutschland GmbH (GID) is to establish more recycling projects. This is why the partnership with Wetropa – a manufacturer of high-quality foam packaging – and the reprocessing of EPE (expanded polyethylene) production residues came into being.
EPE is often used in the packaging sector as transport or impact protection and for scratch-sensitive goods. Therefore, during the cutting process, there are always some leftover quantities that can no longer be used. Since the sections have a large volume but only a low weight due to the specific material, GID relies on presses that compress the material in such a way that the loading weight can be increased to approx. 22 t per truck. The EPE rods are processed into regranulate of the highest purity at the Eschwege site.
Thanks to the high quality standards and the single-variety processing, the regranulates returned in this way can be used again 1:1 in new, equivalent products for the packaging industry. “With the EPE project, we would like to create the transition to a cross-industry recycling economy in the long term and harmonize economic action with ecological thinking,” is the vision of Matthias Henning, Managing Director of GID.
